This was one of six questions that over 100 community members responded to during an energizing brainstorming session at OpenMRS’ 2018 Implementer’s Meeting in Nairobi, Kenya. By the end of the hour, the community had generated over 1,500 ideas! Over the coming weeks, we’ll be sharing summaries for each of the questions.
During the session, the following six How Might We? questions were presented on the board to the room, one at a time:
- How might we make reporting less of a headache?
- How might we attract & engage (new and existing) people to the OpenMRS community?
- How might we make implementing OpenMRS easier?
- How might we make scaling up OpenMRS easier for you & your users?
- How might we make OpenMRS the world’s best electronic health record by 2030?
- How might we build & sustain the OpenMRS community – dedicated to – tangibly improving world health?
Groups of 4-6 community members brainstormed together for 6 minutes. After each prompt, the responses were collected and the next question presented. We recorded all of these ideas in a table, then grouped them by different themes. Read on for a summary of the main themes.
Deliberately grow and strengthen the OpenMRS community
- Better explain what OpenMRS is and the positive impact electronic health records have on healthcare systems.
- Create greater awareness of OpenMRS by improving our marketing and messaging.
- Update and improve documentation and implementer support.
- Reach out to current members, involve more stakeholders, and organize a variety of meetings.
- Build a common vision together.
- Provide more opportunities for capacity building, for clinicians, core users, implementers, developers, and UI designers.
- Establish regional or local communities.
- Increase diversity in multiple areas.
- Encourage contributions back to the community
Build a strong electronic medical record tool that
- Is fast to implement
- Has a really intuitive user interface
- Works on mobile and at scale
- Functions online, offline, and at the point of care
- Has libraries of shareable concept dictionaries, indicators, workflows, forms, clinical decision support tools, and reports
- Has a straightforward data pipeline from data acquisition to report sharing
- Is interoperable with other systems
- Easy to customize and configure without programing knowledge
- Is modular in its development to encourage multiple developer communities
