From CommCare's support of community health workers to RapidSMS's ability to monitor childhood illnesses, a number of OMC technologies are being used to improve healthcare delivery in developing regions. As part of this effort, the OMC is also connecting these technologies to larger and more domain-specific systems like OpenMRS -- an open source medical record system used in over 20 developing countries.

Reasons to Bring Mobile to OpenMRS

In most deployments of OpenMRS, clinicians fill out a paper form with patient data. They place that form into the patient's folder and every few days, data clerks enter that information into the OpenMRS server. Once in the server, the data is available for clinical studies, administrative reports and sometimes printed patient summaries. While this is an improvement over a purely paper-based system, it also has a major flaw -- useful patient data (clinical alerts, lab tests, drug interactions) are not readily available to clinicians for decision making.

To address this issue, the Open Data Kit (ODK) team has been working with the OpenMRS and OpenXData communities to bring mobile phone connectivity using ODK to OpenMRS. Specifically, ODK now has OpenMRS form filling and patient record syncing -- two features that push patient data collection and observation to the mobile phone.