Monthly Archive for August, 2010

OpenMRS hackathon: a community profile

Published on 2010/8/22 in Coding, General and mHealth. 0 Comments Tags: , , , , , .

I spent the latter portion of this past week at the 2010 OpenMRS hackathon in Indianapolis, Indiana at UIPUI university getting an inside look at an effective Open Source ICT4D project. As a result of the gathering, I hope to contribute back some improvements to the software over the coming weeks. For the moment, I want to share details of their compelling project:

OpenMRS Hackathon at Regenstrief Institute

OpenMRS is a powerful electronic medical records (EMR) package used at hundreds of clinics around the world in about 46 developing countries.

The Open Source project was founded in 2006. For US readers, the highest profile user is likely Partners in Health. They apply it very actively as their ICT4D/mHealth solution in most of the countries they serve including Haiti, Peru, Mexico and Rwanda.  They also employ several full time Open Source contributors to the project.

Vibrant Open Source projects often draw from an eclectic variety of contributors. Given this, it is somehow not surprising that this kind of scheme can blossom with good software so effectively. Talent attracts talent. It seemed that each of the participant categories at the hackathon was represented by rockstar programmers that also had their MD’s.

The two-day event kicked off with the weekly developers’ screencast conference call. We had contributors from at least 3 continents represented on the line and another 20 developers in the room. Some 6 major contributors worked at the main Regenstrief Institute office above our venue. Another 3 worked for Partners in Health. There was an assortment of graduate students from nearby universities. On the phone, participants from the just-completed Google Summer of Code joined in (OpenMRS is one of the program’s top largest and longest-running projects).

The conference call itself opened slowly but soon we had contributors demoing slick integrations of SMS + website patient profile up on the large screen. The developer was able load a patient’s full record, including details of their participation in various programs and send them a relevant SMS reminder from the same page seamlessly. Responses from the patient were saved back to the patients record as an instant message log.

I should have more to say about the coding event over the coming days, for now I simply leave these impressions.

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Secondary and Post-Secondary Initiatives

Published on 2010/8/19 in Education and General. 0 Comments Tags: , , , , .
Image representing Accenture as depicted in Cr...
Accenture advised on SEDP2 / tbt

Continuing from last week’s post on Primary initiatives in Tanzania with US corporations:

Secondary: Tanzania Beyond Tomorrow (SEDP2) (pdf SEDP II overview) (home page)

This project, utilizing the business consulting expertise of Accenture, is still very much in the planning stages to discover the tools necessary to bring the next big jumpstart of quality for Tanzania’s high school/secondary education system. It may be funded by 450Mil grant similar to the SEDP from years past that drastically increased the number of secondary schools and secondary school enrollment.

Founding Ideas:

  • Will work with 4,000 schools, and 1.5m secondary school students each year.
  • Secondary Teachers can be more effective with laptop + inexpensive projector.
  • Computers can be a platform for continuing education.
  • Video and Distance eLearning might be used as a way to provide valuable, well-educated teachers with opportunities to live in desirable and well supported locales such as Dar Es Salaam but still reach the millions of rural students in remote areas with weaker infrastructure.
  • Video may also allow fewer teachers to reach more students in fast-expanding areas like Dar Es Salaam.

Links:

Post-Secondary: UDOM/University of Dodoma partners with IBM (link)

There are also the beginnings of parallel efforts to improve collaboration of new Tanzanian Universities with outside organizations. IBM has followed up on its initiative to send many of its Corporate Service Corps members to University of Dodoma over the last year with an agreement with Tri-Continental to help service the swiftly growing Dodoma University as it reaches for its 40,000 student goal, along with improvements which may be related to governance and the primary and secondary levels.

Speaking recently when presenting a paper at a training session in Dar es Salaam, IBM East Africa marketing and communications manager Maureen Muthua said the agreement between IBM and the Ministry of Education and Vocational Training aimed at helping realise the government’s vision of building a ‘Silicon Valley’ type of environment around Dodoma University. (link)

This post continued from 3 Major Corporate ICT Collaborations at Each Education Level: Tanzania. Don’t miss the first page.

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