“Collaboration collaboration and collaboration would take us far and faster”
Several sessions brought out multiple examples of community collaboration happening at the local, regional, and global levels. Our opening plenary’s speakers, Carol Kamasaka (Digital Health Specialist, Ministry of Health, Uganda) and Onesmus Kamau (Acting Head of the Division of Informatics, Ministry of Health, Kenya) shared their experiences and insights into what made cross-border collaboration work. On Wednesday, ministry and country implementation leaders from Nigeria, Nepal, Uganda, Rwanda, Lesotho, and Kenya took to the stage. The panelists shared their country challenges and priorities – and then dove into how local implementers are working together to face shared implementation challenges head on in their respective countries.
By OMRS20, our community had more than double the squads and double the organizations investing resources in those squads. During OMRS20, we had a chance to see what eight collaborative squads and teams were able to achieve during our Annual Squad Showcase. The showcases featured a new UI framework for OpenMRS that leverages modern javascript frameworks harnessing microservice architecture; a new frontend webapp to help OpenMRS implementers to author and curate terminology; a range of COVID-19 solutions; an analytics engine to improve OMRS data use for indicator reporting; community-led quality assurance processes and tools; how the OpenMRS Academy went from concept note to delivery; and new tooling to enable the representation of OpenMRS data as FHIR resources.
Be sure to join us in 2021 for our next Squad Showcase! Squad Showcases happen throughout the year and are a great way to keep track of what the community is working towards.
Couldn’t make OMRS20 this year? Missed a session? Simply go to our 2020 Virtual Implementers Meeting schedule and click on the hyperlinks for a replay.
And a special thanks to all of our guest speakers for bringing your country to life at our virtual forum!
Mr. Onesmus Kamau (Ministry of Health, Kenya), Carol Kamasaka (Ministry of Health, Uganda Health Informatics Association, Uganda), Dr. Bikash Devkota (Ministry of Health and Population, Nepal), Olasupo Oyedepo (Ministry of Health, ICT4Health Project, Nigeria), Baptiste Byiringiro (Ministry of Health, Rwanda), Monaheng Maoeng (Ministry of Health, Lesotho), Tebeho Koma (ICAP Lesotho), Khaled Bediri (Partners in Health, Sierra Leone), Benard Otieno (Palladium, Kenya), Jonathan Mpango (Makarere University, Uganda), Gibril Gomez (JHPIEGO, Nigeria), Sanjay Poudel (Possiblehealth NepalEHR, Nepal).