Hi all. In an email today from Richard Stallman, he encouraged us to look for potential collaborations with GNU Health.
Looking at the map at http://health.gnu.org/services.html I know they definitely cover parts of the world that OpenMRS (and I think also OpenEMR) have not yet really explored.
However, I’m not fully familiar with their tech stack, although I do know they have an embedded FHIR/REST server. I know traditionally they have more been focused on primary care, and looking at http://hg.savannah.gnu.org/hgweb/health/ it seems that Dr. Luis is doing most of the coding these days.
Would anyone be interested & able to start a discussion with Luis? It could be very interesting, but I personally just don’t know how feasible/practical such collaboration would be. Would really like to find out, though.
Python and Postgres and a bunch of XML and shell scripts so far. Really old style dev and web sites, worse than open-emr.org… looks like a local client app, but not sure. The first steps guide does not tell you how to launch the app.
I don’t think we need to be on the same technology stack to collaborate. That is the idea of FHIR, SMART or even OWA for that matter. We all agree to a common API and then build tools that can be shared and used. Web interoperability through a loosely coupled architecture has served us very well, as can be seen from the scale of the internet. I don’t see any reason why it couldn’t work in healthcare, if only ppl weren’t so adamant on guarding territories.
I do want to add that collaboration takes a lot of effort… the GNU Health codebase seems quite basic for what it can do. If that project wants to build on a common API, with minimal overheads of collaboration, why not?
I was in no way saying not to do it – I like the collaboration and the joining of forces of the OpenEMR team coming onboard – if we get the GNU Health team, that’s just gravy!
