A friendly introduction and a question about good first issues?

OpenEMR Development
#1

I just wanted to introduce myself as an interested party in contributing some time whenever I can! I’ve worked commercially on a pretty similar product - a PACS/RIS/EMR solution - and have spent a fair amount of time working with HL7 (“pipes and hats”, I think FHIR was still a draft back in 2015?) and DICOM.

I’ve been doing some reading, exploring the test suite, as well as getting familiar with both the UI and the FHIR endpoints via the local Docker dev environment. I actually saw a bug on Github that I thought looked like a good little task, but after spending an hour debugging an FHIR endpoint I realised it was actually a documentation issue… Doh!

I was wondering whether there were any small digestible tasks that would help keep things ticking over and support development overall? I’d love to get involved with OpenEMR in my spare time!

1 Like
#2

Hi @FergusInLondon
Yes, that certainly was a friendly introduction, and allow me to welcome you to the OpenEMR community!

I’m a customer service/ documentation kinda guy, myself, and really don’t have knowledge of small digestible tasks you could do with all that coding expertise you possess; some of the dev-types would have to advise on that. But that documentation issue you found would be a perfectly legitimate contribution, don’t you know?

In case you haven’t run across it already, a LOT of documentation, mostly user docs, is kept in the OpenEMR wiki which is a very useful resource even if it is a little disorganized in places. It’s found at:
https://www.open-emr.org/wiki/index.php/OpenEMR_Wiki_Home_Page

Check out the User Manuals, section 2.11 in the TOC at the top of the page, or just go to
https://www.open-emr.org/wiki/index.php/OpenEMR_6.0.0_Users_Guide
for the Book of the current version.

Another good way to get to know OpenEMR and find ideas of things to contribute is to cruise through this forum reading the posts of problems people are having, then find the answers for yourself or create a fix to submit.

Really, the only way to go about it is to get to know the application, then find a project that inspires you. If you’re short on medical experience to inform your software design decisions this forum is loaded with healthcare professionals who would be happy to advise!

Feel free to ask any questions that may occur to you- this is a very outgoing and helpful community.
Best- Harley