Welcome to The Humanitarian FOSS Project @ Mount Holyoke College
We are part of a growing community involved in The Humanitarian FOSS Project, dedicated to building and using Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) to benefit humanity.
Students participating in the HFOSS project at Mt. Holyoke are learning valuable computing skills, such as: web application technology, the open source software process, and working in a team on a large project. This is all being done in the context of a humanitarian project that has real users throughout the world. In this way, we follow in the mission of Mount Holyoke College to use our talents for "purposeful engagement with the world".
The OpenMRS Project
We are participating in the OpenMRS project, an open source medical record system that is in use in many developing countries, including Haiti, Rwanda, and Peru. Countries, such as these, in the developing world are often ravaged by diseases such as tuberculosis, AIDS and malaria, while simultaneously having limited access to healthcare. The goal of OpenMRS is to support healthcare workers in the maintenance of health information about their patients without the cost associated with proprietary solutions.
OpenMRS is used at many clinics. At each clinic, health care providers enter information on paper forms. Data entry people then enter the data on these forms into the database. One difficulty with this approach is that each clinic has its own forms. To simplify data entry, people create html forms that look like the paper forms, making it easier for data entry people to enter the data. Unfortunately, creating these html forms is very tedious. Our project is to provide support for the creation of forms. We are developing a module to plug in to OpenMRS to support the creation of new medical record forms.