Development and Deployment of the OpenMRS-Ebola Electronic Health Record System for an Ebola Treatment Center in Sierra Leone.
Shefali OzaDarius JazayeriJonathan M TeichEllen BallPatricia Alexandra NankubugeJob RwebemberaKevin WingAlieu Amara SesayAndrew S KanterGlauber D RamosDavid WaltonRachael CummingsFrancesco ChecchiHamish S F FraserPublished in: Journal of medical Internet research (2017)
To our knowledge, OpenMRS-Ebola is the most comprehensive adaptable clinical EHR built for a low-resource setting health emergency. It is designed to address the main challenges of data collection in highly infectious environments that require robust infection prevention and control measures and it is interoperable with other electronic health systems. Although we built and deployed OpenMRS-Ebola more rapidly than typical software, our work highlights the challenges of having to develop an appropriate system during an emergency rather than being able to rapidly adapt an existing one. Lessons learned from this and previous emergencies should be used to ensure that a set of well-designed, easy-to-use, pretested health software is ready for quick deployment in future.