The OpenMRS leadership team met in Boston earlier this month to review OpenMRS priorities. Before meeting, we asked for your feedback on OpenMRS priorities to help guide the road map over the next year. Your feedback really helped inform our discussion and focus our priorities. We heard very clear priorities for improving existing functionality and improving our documentation. We also heard that priorities apply not only to the OpenMRS “core”, but also to modules bundled with OpenMRS, including HTML Form Entry, XForms, the latest Reporting framework, and Logic.
This is our proposed road map for OpenMRS in 2011. We welcome continuous feedback from the community (implementers and developers) on our priorities, since meeting the needs of our implementations is at the core of our mission.
Proposed Road Map for OpenMRS in 2011
Documentation: The most frequent request from the community feedback was for improved documentation. In 2011, OpenMRS will dedicate significant resources toward improving documentation for developers and implementers and setting up the infrastructure to keep the documentation improving in the years to come. In the next few weeks, we will create opportunities for the community to participate in forming our strategy; look for notifications (on mailing lists, Twitter, Facebook, etc.) as we welcome broad community input to improve OpenMRS documentation.
Improving Existing Functionality: Over the past few years, we introduced several new features to OpenMRS; however, in many cases these features have not been widely adopted (or as widely adopted as their potential) because we have not refined or simplified them. Examples of these features are:
- Reporting
- HTML Form Entry
- Concept Management Tools
- XForms
- Logic
- Sync Module
Improving the Platform: Many implementers & developers have asked for OpenMRS to integrate more readily with other systems (like mobile solutions and hospital systems). We also realize that a more flexible and agile framework for user interface development could be an enormous boost for the community, by making it easier for developers to turn around new features in significantly less time.
- Web Services 1.0
- User Interface 2.0
New Functionality: While we are always interested in expanding on OpenMRS features, the community was clear in prioritizing the previously mentioned improvements over new features in the months ahead. That said, there will still be some significant new features arriving over the next year, such as:
- Order Entry
- Visits
- Episodes of Care
Over the next year, we envision OpenMRS making ourselves one of the more well-documented open source efforts with a strong, robust feature set, including a suite of well-documented web services and an improved framework that allows OpenMRS developers to be limited only by their imagination.
Thanks… and, again, we welcome your continued input and feedback on our road map. We’re all in this together.
— The OpenMRS Leadership Team