Imagine you are setting up a Medical Records System at a new location. This new site may have 10, 50, 100, or more forms. Every single question and answer needs a code, so that clinical information can be stored correctly – e.g. “Asthma” might be coded by the computer as A1234. You feel overwhelmed thinking about the hundreds or thousands of codes you will need for just this one site. There are also many other new locations waiting to go-live. How would you get started?
User Centered. One of the OpenMRS Community’s core values, being user-centered means that we come together to design solutions that will solve real problems faced by OpenMRS implementers and users.
As a community, OpenMRS built a new product for and together with implementers: the Dictionary Manager Web App. This web application was built with the support of different stakeholders, implementers, and content management experts.
To make sure that the Dictionary Manager Web App addressed the real needs of its users, the OpenMRS Dictionary Manager Squad decided to dig into who our users are and what they want.
As a part of user research, we conducted user interviews with seven different users from a variety of organizations. The results of these interviews were used to develop User Personas for the Dictionary Manager Web App, including each person’s motivation to use the app and their pain-points.
Implementers voiced two major interests and concerns:
From the interviews, we identified three different team set-ups common among OpenMRS users:
We found that all the organizations lack in-house terminology experts. They often seek support from other organizations, like CIEL, to decide on correct terminology.
The Dictionary Manager Web App has given our implementers a single place to manage codes. We continue to improve the product based on our discussions with real users. We determine what users have the most difficulty with, so we prioritize our tasks accordingly. We now maintain a mini-roadmap that focuses primarily on the most required feature: supporting reuse of concepts and dictionaries which can be pulled from all public content.
Would you like to get involved? Discover more about our community and the Dictionary Manager Squad. We’d love to hear from you!