Andela is a global software development organization with a mission for building programming capacity in Kenya and Nigeria. They are recruiting some of the most talented developers in Africa, shaping them into technical and thought leaders, and places them as full-time distributed team members with companies that range from Microsoft and IBM to dozens of high-growth startups. Their self-funding model of education allows developers to finance their own education through their work. As a result, Andela attracts both working professionals and high-achieving college graduates. One of the ways the Andela students get hands-on experience is by working with organizations like OpenMRS.
Africa has the youngest, fastest-growing population on earth and by connecting top employers to the brightest individuals on the African continent, Andela provides a bridge to close the talent gap while investing in the smartest, most creative minds in software development. Andela is committed to driving change for women in technology — and we’re starting with all-female cohorts, mentoring young women in tech, and ensuring a safe, secure, and fair work environment.
OpenMRS is privileged to have the incredible minds of Andela developers committed to working on the open source Electronic Medical Record Platform from OpenMRS. Andela has committed apprentice developers to OpenMRS for six months to support the mission of the global community. Currently, the developers working with OpenMRS are Femi Oladeji, Chukwuemeka Nwankwo, Azeez Olaniran, and Enaho Murphy.
The new group of Andela developers have been working on the Cohort Builder tool of OpenMRS, and was able to re-write the platform to Javascript using the ReactJS framework and also transforming the User Interface (UI) to match the current openMRS legacy-ui Interface so as to enable better user experience.
The Cohort Builder is a reporting tool used to perform ad-hoc queries for patients with defined characteristics, and combines multiple queries into more complex ones. A cohort is a group of patients based on similar conditions, such as patients receiving similar kinds of treatment, which can be monitored over a period of time. Cohort management systems, unlike patient management systems, all for the monitoring and suggestion of possible cures to cohort groups, providing the ability to analyze trends and patterns in order to facilitate research and policy making.
The collaboration between OpenMRS and Andela has provided unique experiences for developers to get hands-on experience in global health and medical record platforms. “Working on this project with the team has helped in improving my understanding of patient data storage and collection/retrieval in the medical field, and also has taught me the relevance of OpenMRS in the health sector especially in most African countries.” said Fortune Ekeruo, an Andela developer in Nigeria.
To follow Andela’s work with OpenMRS keep an eye on OpenMRS’ Community Talk Forum.