I’m pleased to announce the availability of OpenMRS 1.8. Recently, we asked the OpenMRS community for suggestions on how to improve the performance of our system in “real world” implementations. After collecting a lot of feedback, we’re proud to announce this latest version, which is less focused on new functionality, and more focused on making existing functionality faster and more efficient. More importantly, we used this release cycle to integrate consistent mechanisms to evaluate the performance of the core application. From now on, we will be able to make sure that new versions of the code get faster, not slower, through continuous benchmarking.
We also now offer a new “standalone” version of OpenMRS. With this version, everything you need to run OpenMRS is available in one place. Download the file, expand it, and double-click and start using OpenMRS on Linux, Mac OS X, or Windows – instantly.
[button style=”tick” color=”silver” link=”http://openmrs.org/download/”]You should visit our download page to get OpenMRS 1.8 here.[/button]
Performance Improvements
- The Patient Dashboard and a number of other pages simply load faster.
- Search results are returned in a shorter time (e.g., when searching for patients, encounters, concepts, etc.).
- The cohort builder has been sped up.
- The data exports feature has been improved to consume less memory and attain better speed.
- More performance-focused work has been done in modules that are commonly used across most implementations. Feel free to browse the OpenMRS Module Repository to check for any new versions and upgrade.
New Features
- Program Location Module has been incorporated into the Core application
- Improved workflow when adding a new program and state
- Added complex obs BinaryDataHandler to core
- Showing of a list of currently logged in users
- Ability to archive HL7 to file system instead of moving it to file system
See the OpenMRS 1.8 Release Notes for a complete list of performance improvements and new features.
A big thank you to all of you that have contributed! Your relentless hard work is a success. This release features some 49 developers and nearly 200 resolved issues. To check some of your contributions, and to meet the people who helped make OpenMRS 1.8, head over to the release notes page.
As always, please let us know about any bugs you might find or ideas you have for future releases of OpenMRS.
Please continue to contribute all you can to make OpenMRS better and the most reliable and robust open source medical records system in existence today! Not only are we always looking for application developers, we welcome volunteers for all types of work to keep the OpenMRS project running. Find out how you can get involved today. We thank you all for making this all possible.
Congratulations all! We look forward to your continued support, dedication, and contributions.
Wyclif Luyima
OpenMRS 1.8 Release Manager