Health IT

Hi all,

My name is William Aviles and I work as the Director of Informatics for the
NGO the Sustanaible Sciences Institute (SSI). We work closely with the
Ministry of Health in infectious disease research, epidemiology and high
priority health service delivery areas (immunizations, prenatal health
tracking, etc.). We have been working with the public health authorities in
Nicaragua in order to get an OpenMRS system up and running for the
department (= state or province) of Managua, serving aorund 1.4 million
people (21 health clinics and 13 hospitals).

We have some pilot project funding and a basic familiarization with the
system requirements so far, but no developers/coders on our or the MoH IT
team so far. Based on what I understand from current OpenMRS deployments in
other countries, I think we've got great potential to be successful with
this here in Managua - we are setting up host servers based at the central
Managua MoH offices, we have adequate computers capabable of running the
application, within the year we will have relatively reliable internet in
all 21 health centers and hospitals, and we have a commitment by the Managua
MoH to train their own IT support team (cc ...

Hi all,

My name is William Aviles and I work as the Director of Informatics for the
NGO the Sustanaible Sciences Institute (SSI). We work closely with the
Ministry of Health in infectious disease research, epidemiology and high
priority health service delivery areas (immunizations, prenatal health
tracking, etc.). We have been working with the public health authorities in
Nicaragua in order to get an OpenMRS system up and running for the
department (= state or province) of Managua, serving aorund 1.4 million
people (21 health clinics and 13 hospitals).

We have some pilot project funding and a basic familiarization with the
system requirements so far, but no developers/coders on our or the MoH IT
team so far. Based on what I understand from current OpenMRS deployments in
other countries, I think we've got great potential to be successful with
this here in Managua - we are setting up host servers based at the central
Managua MoH offices, we have adequate computers capabable of running the
application, within the year we will have relatively reliable internet in
all 21 health centers and hospitals, and we have a commitment by the Managua
MoH to train their own IT support team (cc'd here) in deploying and
maintaining the system long term.

We would benefit greatly from this same kind of training that will be run in
Rwanda and are VERY interested in any materials, lessons-learned, etc. that
result from your first OpenMRS training curriculum. What is the timline for
this training and when might it be availble to replicate it in other
countries?

William

William Avilés, Director of Informatics
Sustainable Sciences Institute
Managua, Nicaragua

Hello all,

We currently have two great mentors at the EHSDI - E-Health Software Development and Implementation - Program in Rwanda. We are seeking a third mentor, preferrably one who can stay until October 2009 or longer. If you are interested in teaching java, enterprise java (hibernate, tomcat, spring), or supporting students to develop modules on OpenMRS, please contact me at and send me a resume.

Thanks,
Amy Tang

Hello William,

Thank you for your reply. The ongoing OpenMRS in Nicaragua has much momentum, and we can understand that since we are also working with the Ministry of Health to scale-up the OpenMRS system to be used nationally in Rwanda. We can understand your need for technical personnel to implement, manage, and develop modules in OpenMRS in response to clinical and administrative needs.

This is the first time we are running this training course, which is designed to run for eleven months. We are currently finishing our second unit of web design. Here is the most up-to-date schedule for the curriculum, which is subject to change:

Unit 1 - Computer Foundations (1 week)
Unit 2 - Web Design including HTML, XHTML, XML, JavaScript, jQuery (5 weeks)
Unit 3 - Basic Java (5 weeks)
Unit 4 - Advanced Java (7 weeks)
Unit 5 - Implementation of OpenMRS (3 weeks)
Unit 6 - Enterprise Java including Hibernate, Spring, Tomcat (6 weeks)
Unit 7 - OpenMRS Development (7 weeks)
Unit 8 - OpenMRS Module Development (9 weeks)


We currently have lecture and exercise materials for the first two units. We are in discussion about the creation of a public Wiki site for post our materials as our training course continues ...

Hello William,

Thank you for your reply. The ongoing OpenMRS in Nicaragua has much momentum, and we can understand that since we are also working with the Ministry of Health to scale-up the OpenMRS system to be used nationally in Rwanda. We can understand your need for technical personnel to implement, manage, and develop modules in OpenMRS in response to clinical and administrative needs.

This is the first time we are running this training course, which is designed to run for eleven months. We are currently finishing our second unit of web design. Here is the most up-to-date schedule for the curriculum, which is subject to change:

Unit 1 - Computer Foundations (1 week)
Unit 2 - Web Design including HTML, XHTML, XML, JavaScript, jQuery (5 weeks)
Unit 3 - Basic Java (5 weeks)
Unit 4 - Advanced Java (7 weeks)
Unit 5 - Implementation of OpenMRS (3 weeks)
Unit 6 - Enterprise Java including Hibernate, Spring, Tomcat (6 weeks)
Unit 7 - OpenMRS Development (7 weeks)
Unit 8 - OpenMRS Module Development (9 weeks)


We currently have lecture and exercise materials for the first two units. We are in discussion about the creation of a public Wiki site for post our materials as our training course continues. We will keep you posted if we find server space to host these materials publically in the near future.

Thanks,
Amy

Amy Tang
Program Manger of EHSDI Training Course
Kigali, Rwanda

Hi Amy and William,

This course sounds wonderful, it would be HUGELY HELPFUL to have all of the course materials available online. I will soon start working on OpenMRS with VillageHealthWorks.org in Burundi, and was planning on teaching myself most of this (Units 3-8 on the syllabus below). It would be great to have as much online as possible - videos of lectures and/or voice over power point, and class notes would be wonderful.

If you are looking for space to host a wiki, pbwiki.com hosts free wikis for educational projects. Their technology is sophisticated and they have really great support. If you are unwilling to use a commercial wiki, I would be willing to help you explore alternatives in order to have access to these materials.

Thank you!
cheers
Isaac

Isaac, Amy, William,

I have had good luck with wikis and pbwiki.com in the past, but there's an even better option -- you can host the materials right here in the Technology community on GHDonline! Just click on the "Add Resource" button above, and you can add all the documents and other materials you would like.

Once the documents are uploaded, you can discuss them on GHDonline, but we also provide search capabilities. We automatically index all uploaded documents and add them to our search interface, so you can easily find what you're looking for across multiple resources.

-Aaron

Isaac, Amy and Aaron,

I work with William and the Sustainable Sciences Institute on the Nicaragua
projects - I just wanted to pipe up and say that this is exciting to see so
much momentum around shared training materials for OpenMRS implementations.
Using the GHD technology list for the materials themselves as they become
available would be GREAT! Thanks Aaron for suggesting that - it would keep
things simple and accessible.

Looking forward to taking a look at first few modules for the Rwanda
trainings, and to continuing to share info and experiences as we all go
forward with this kind of capacity building.

cheers, Heather
--

Hi Aaron

I'm one of the mentors on this training program. Yesterday I checked out pbwiki and the Add Resource functionality of this site. I'm thinking it might be confusing to upload all of our resources directly onto this site because of their shear volume, and it would be much easier to convey the overall structure of this course through a wiki. We could upload links to the resources for each unit as they are completed.

I think its also important that we can easily update the resources as this will be a constantly "evolving" course and I see that pbwiki supports document versioning which is great.

I am a little concerned though about tying ourselves to a commercial service such as pbwiki, even though we use their basic functionality for free. Perhaps Mediawiki or something else open source would be more appropriate.

What do you think?

-Rowan

Hi Rowan, All,

We sure understand some of your concerns re: content editing and control as well as trying to limit any confusion. To address a few, and contrary to other online solutions, GHDonline sets no limitations for members to upload resources to the communities. We feel that all resources and documents that can help improve global health delivery should be made available so you can publish as many resources as you wish here.

Regarding the issue of updating resources: all members who post resources can edit them when signed in. To do so, just sign in, click on a resource that you have posted, and click on "Edit this resource". You can change the file, topic, etc.

In the end, I feel you may just double your workload by choosing to have your own platform (not counting the time to search for said platform and deploying it) instead of just posting here.

What we have done in the past for other resources like this (involving many chapters and related documents) is actually post all the documents in the community first, then create a discussion with all the chapter titles and links within GHDonline (for example in the Help section ...

Hi Rowan, All,

We sure understand some of your concerns re: content editing and control as well as trying to limit any confusion. To address a few, and contrary to other online solutions, GHDonline sets no limitations for members to upload resources to the communities. We feel that all resources and documents that can help improve global health delivery should be made available so you can publish as many resources as you wish here.

Regarding the issue of updating resources: all members who post resources can edit them when signed in. To do so, just sign in, click on a resource that you have posted, and click on "Edit this resource". You can change the file, topic, etc.

In the end, I feel you may just double your workload by choosing to have your own platform (not counting the time to search for said platform and deploying it) instead of just posting here.

What we have done in the past for other resources like this (involving many chapters and related documents) is actually post all the documents in the community first, then create a discussion with all the chapter titles and links within GHDonline (for example in the Help section with the FAQs: http://www.ghdonline.org/helpcommunity/resource/faqs-table-of-contents/ - note: this will open a new window). The added bonus for this: members can actually provide you with some feedback on the resources. If you feel like this is a good solution, and are interested in discussing further just let me know here.

Of course, if you'd rather have a separate website, we sure hope you will share all these resources with members with a summary. Note that you can also add both a file for members to download (say your chapter in PDF) and, at the same time, a link to the resource - enabling your site to be referenced but also allowing members to download the documents directly if they wish to/need to because of computer/internet access limitations.

If you still want to look for free solutions, I just stumbled on this open source software for building digital library collections. Not sure about the capabilities, functionalities and design... but you may want to look it up: Greenstone http://greenstone.org

Best of luck – hoping to read more updates as they come!

Hi all,

I saw a reference to the Rwandan OPenMRS Training Program. Is there a link
to that?

Thanks.

alvin

--
Alvin B. Marcelo, MD (www.alvinmarcelo.com)

Director, National Telehealth Center
Director for Southeast Asia, International Open Source Network
Associate Professor of Surgery (Trauma), University of the Philippines
Manila
GPG: 0x77B200CA