LibreHealth and OpenMRS are clinical efforts, first and foremost. But a number of researchers and pharma companies are building bridges with clinicians and eager to get access to clinical data. I have been talking to the tranSMART Foundation, who offer free software tools to health researchers, and have heard that pharma companies are also interested in extending FHIR to serve their needs. Is anyone on this list envisioning extensions to LibreHealth that could be of interest to researchers?
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I copy this from a Facebook post I saw. I can’t speak to its relevance to LibreHealth.
I was in this odd-looking rotunda at the Harvard Medical School yesterday for a health IT forum where the tranSMART Foundation and i2b2 projects discussed their progress. Dr. Zak Kohane, whom I last saw speak three months ago at a Petrie-Flom conference, is at the podium again. Both tranSMART and i2b2 are free software projects that are distinguished by their strong backing and stability as community projects. tranSMART has just released a new version with vastly simplified installation and packaging, making it suitable for wider use.
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This is very relevant and pharma can be one of the consumer of LibreHealth. We could have a researchers distribution that bundles Natural Language Processing modules, analysis and reporting modules, and a few things that people have created over the years for OpenMRS, but package it like a distribution.
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Thanks for these ideas, Saptarshi. Would you like to follow up with me separately? I’m curious what OpenMRS already offers, how we’d present it as a “package” (as you say) to pharma, and who in the LibreHealth community might have the cycles to work on it.
I would be very interested and would be willing to put my lab resources to work on a research distribution of LibreHealth. We are already using the platform, visit notes analysis module (@Barry), html reports and a few other modules for analyzing clinical notes and Facebook conversations among clinician network. We don’t have drug discovery, medication analysis or reconciliation modules yet.
The research distribution can be subproject called “LibreHealth Research” and tagged “lh-research” or something of that sort. It will be a continuous delivery model where any module releases that are part of the distribution builds and releases a new packaged war. That subproject could ask for grants or work on building such modules.
I don’t have your expertise, but I would like to stay up-to-date with your efforts and maybe write about them at some point. Could you contact me out-of-band for a quick discussion? I’m andyo at the domain praxagora.com.