Our world continues to be ravaged by a pandemic of epic proportions, as over 40 million people are infected with or dying from HIV/AIDS -- most (up to 95%) are in developing countries. Prevention and treatment of HIV/AIDS on this scale requires efficient information management, which is critical as HIV/AIDS care must increasingly be entrusted to less skilled providers. Whether for lack of time, developers, or money, most HIV/AIDS programs in developing countries manage their information with simple spreadsheets or small, poorly designed databases...if anything at all. To help them, we need to find a way not only to improve management tools, but also to reduce unnecessary, duplicative efforts. As a response to these challenges, OpenMRS formed in 2004 as a open source medical record system framework for developing countries -- a tide which rises all ships. Over the past decade, OpenMRS has been adapted and used beyond HIV/AIDS for TB, Ebola, maternal-child health, and chronic care. OpenMRS is a multi-institution, nonprofit collaborative led by organizations such as Regenstrief Institute, Inc. (regenstrief.org), a world-renowned leader in medical informatics research, and Partners In Health (pih.org), a Boston-based philanthropic organization with a focus on improving the lives of underprivileged people worldwide through health care service and advocacy. We have also formed a non-profit, OpenMRS, Inc., whose mission is to support the worldwide OpenMRS community. These teams nurture a growing worldwide network of individuals and organizations all focused on creating medical record systems and a corresponding implementation network to allow system development self reliance within resource constrained environments. To date, OpenMRS has been implemented in dozens of developing countries, including South Africa, Kenya, Rwanda, Lesotho, Uganda, Tanzania, Haiti, Mozambique, Sierra Leone, and India.
- Twitter: Students interested in applying to GSoC 2018 to work on an OpenMRS project are asked to complete a Google Summer of Code 2018 application and provide the following information: