“Saving  lives” that’s mUzima’s mission as a software product.

OpenMRS (Open Medical Record System) is a web based open source software project founded to enable the delivery of health care in developing countries, the system is designed to be usable by health care providers with poor computing resources and/or little IT skills. OpenMRS works with forms, data items and reports. OpenMRS is highly modifiable and functionalities are extended in software extensions known as Modules. Patient information and health records are collected in electronic forms , and the collected data are stored in databases.

OpenMRS modules can be thought of as OpenMRS extensions/Add-ons, in that they add additional health records management functionalities. Examples of such modules  (important to our project) are the mUzima module and HtmlForm Entry module.

mUzima is an Android based mobile health records management software  built ontop of mUzima Open MRS module, it also works with forms, data items and reports. Currently, with mUzima health records are collected using mUzima forms which are HTML forms, with javascript (jquery) for validations.

mUzima mobile technology is accessible to low resource communities in developing countries,  the aim is to save lives by providing OSS to enable proper health record management which is essential to good health care delivery.

There is another module that is used on many OpenMRS instances to create forms, HtmlForm Entry Module. The forms in the Html form entry modules are written in specific  XML tags.

The project goal is to update the mUzima Core module to enable automatic conversion of HtmlForm Entry Module’s forms into mUzima forms.  This will enable  HtmlFormentry Module users to easily migrate to mUzima mobile, and existing  muzima users who have htmlforms on their openmrs instances can reuse the forms on muzima mobile.   My Partner, Sarah Eisa is involved with the front end (Angular 1) while I work on the backend (Java).

Working  on this project is awesome as it gives me an opportunity to impact patient’s lives in far away places, I think that’s the beauty of FOSS. I appreciate working under the guidance of my mentors Simon Savai, Benard Mokaya, Ada Yeung, and my fellow intern Sarah Eisa.

 The project has been a great learning experience, I’ve had my first exposure to  Maven, my knowledge of the tool is increasing as I spend more time working on the project, and wrote my first sets of jUnit test cases. Initially, I was confused about how Maven works but as I spend more time on the project my knowledge of the tool is increasing.

Contributing to mUzima will be awesome and the community is very supportive, you may choose to develop, test or document code. You may check out mUzima on Github, contributors to mUzima projects are Java, Android, and Web developers, Testers. If you’re thinking of using mUzima you may check out the User Guide and the implementation guide.

Thanks for reading, see you some other time 😃😃