On May 26, 2009, the OpenMRS Implementers and Developers Meeting took place in Boston at a new Research Building at Harvard Medical School. Clark, Gari, Leo, Zack, and I attended on behalf of the Moca team. We met many interesting people who were involved in various aspects of OpenMRS - founders, developers, implementers in the field in Africa, university researchers, hospital staff, and company representatives.
The day opened with an introduction of OpenMRS and its vision by co-founder Hamish Fraser. (See slides posted here: http://www.slideshare.net/hamishfraser/openmrs-meeting-boston-introduction). We also had presentations on the current capabilities of OpenMRS as well as deployments (in Kenya, Rwanda, South Africa, Zimbabwe, and Mozambique). In the afternoon, we had breakout sessions about OpenMRS deployment in the field, OpenMRS API and module development, standards/integration of OpenMRS, and clinical decision support. Overall, the meeting was very productive and many sources of collaboration were identified among all the people involved. For example, for myself, I was able to meet many OpenMRS developers for help on my GSOC project, as well as experienced implementers of OpenMRS (for help on research with my research fellowship in the Philippines this summer).
To prepare for my trip to the Philippines in a couple of weeks, I also had a conference call with the University of Philippines team about technical requirements for the pilot and the workflow of the pilot. In addition, I also worked on learning how to setup/install OpenMRS, Tomcat, MySQL so that I would be able to help get the technical team in the Philippines get Moca up and running.
As for my GSOC project, this week I worked on integrating my Flash application with OpenMRS. I made an encounter servlet in OpenMRS to pass encounter information (patient name, ID, image/audio/video obs IDs, and dates) to the Flash application. It didn’t quite work though, so i backed up and tried something simplier. I managed to get successful HTTP get/post requests of text data from Flex to OpenMRS working. From my understanding, passing a Java object into Flex to be converted into an AS3 object is done with Flash remoting, which is a proprietary package. After examining the problem further, it seems that we don’t need the full object to be passed into Flex and text would work just as well. Hence I created an XML schema with a parser for passing encounter data between Flash and Java:
<?xml version=”1.0″ encoding=”utf-8″?>
<encounter patientID=”1010″ patientFirst=”John” patientLast=”Smith”>
<genericFile type=”image” obsID=”39″ summary=”This x-ray is abnormal. Patient could have TB.”>
<annotation text=”This appears abnormal” x=”10″ y=”10″/>
<annotation text=”This also is abnormal” x=”20″ y=”20″/>
<annotation text=”This could be TB” x=”30″ y=”30″/>
</genericFile>
<genericFile type=”audio” obsID=”45″ summary=”The x-ray appears normal.”>
<annotation text=”This is normal” x=”10″ y=”10″/>
</genericFile>
</encounter>
Tags: GSOC Media Viewer, OpenMRS