OpenMRS Contributor of the Month Works on Rwanda eHealth Systems

Michael Downey | OpenMRS Blog | July 5, 2013

Every month, the OpenMRS community profiles one of its many contributors and highlights their story here on our blog. It’s our hope that these profiles can help you to learn more about the people who help build our software and our community. This month, community manager Michael Downey sat down with Dawn Smith, to learn more about her involvement with OpenMRS. Would you like to nominate a contributor for an upcoming month? If so, check out more information about the program on the OpenMRS wiki. We look forward to hearing from you!...

[Dawn Smith]...These days, I’m working in the Rwanda Ministry of Health’s eHealth Department as an implementation lead and program manager for the Rwanda Health Information Exchange (RHIE) initiative, under a contract to Regenstrief Institute. Our project tries to improve healthcare delivery through implementation of a health information exchange that allows healthcare providers to easily save and access patient information for specific care services...

...Rather than helping to organize the daily activities of the OpenMRS community, I’m now working with health centers in Rwanda’s Rwamagana District that use OpenMRS. As part of the RHIE initiative, we utilize OpenMRS as our medical record system at the point of care. That means that clinicians enter data directly during patient consultations. The OpenMRS data then communicates to the interoperability layer and information is stored to the various HIE registries. We actually have an OpenMRS training for clinicians coming up in a few weeks to help clinicians familiarise themselves with the system and train them to use OpenMRS as an integrated component of their clinical workflow.

[Michael Downey]: That’s really exciting work. A health information exchange (HIE) is something that really allows a country’s health system to be more efficient and effective, and we’re always excited when people adopt OpenMRS as part of them...