Looking for Usability Volunteers for Non-Profit Hospital in Rural India Building an EMR

Staff | Interaction Design Association | February 14, 2012

A leading non-profit healthcare organization in rural India, JSS (http://www.jssbilaspur.org/), is building an open-source health information system and is in need of a few energetic, talented volunteers. In a catchment area of about 300,000, JSS operates a multi-nodal hospital, three remote village sub-centers, and an extensive public health outreach program with 104 community health workers.

JSS' founding doctors hail from the premier teaching hospital in south Asia. To further their vision of high-quality healthcare in resource-poor environments, JSS has set forth the ambitious goal of transitioning from its current paper-based recordkeeping system to a cloud-based digital Health Information System. This project will undoubtedly benefit tens of thousands of people in the near term and many more in the long term.

This project not only involves building a health information system for JSS, grounded in the data model of the robust and field-tested OpenMRS platform (www.openmrs.org <http://www.openmrs.org/> ), but also making this system modular, extensible, freely and widely available for other organizations to implement as easily as possible in the future.

In a sense, we are making a canonical open-source point-of-care system, one that will hopefully be the seed for a large number of such developments in the future. Already, healthcare organizations in Cambodia, Kenya, Armenia and the United States have expressed interest in the free and open source software we are building.