bradymiller wrote on Friday, March 29, 2013:
Hi,
Brought in your new stuff with only a couple minor mods. I added your conclusion to the end of the Organization description (note that application has a separate text field for each application question, but I like your idea of not rigidly staying entirely on subject). Let me know what you think and anybody feel free to post revisions/mods etc. Still have several hours left:
a. Organization description (OpenEMR):
The OpenEMR organization is a strong community of developers, physicians, medical professionals, open source activists, patients and concerned citizens all with the common goal of making the OpenEMR software package a superior alternative to its proprietary counterparts. The OpenEMR organization/community is dedicated to maintaining a spirit of openness, kindness and cooperation.
The OpenEMR software package is an open source electronic health records and medical practice management application that can run on almost any platform and is ONC Complete Ambulatory EHR certified. It received a 2012 Bossie Award in the “The Best Open Source Applications” category, is one of the most popular open source electronic medical records in use today with 3700 downloads monthly, and it has been estimated that OpenEMR is serving the medical records for more than 90 million patients worldwide.
The OpenEMR organization/community is truly special. The OpenEMR software package is literally used to keep people alive around the world. To do this effectively, the OpenEMR community has to constantly add features, fix security vulnerabilities, and follow strict and complex laws that are always changing. The OpenEMR community takes on this challenge every day and it is an amazing feeling to contribute to software that is so powerful and so important to so many. The OpenEMR community feels that we are the perfect fit for Google’s Summer of Code because we can spread this incredible feeling to students, while both nurturing their development and advancing OpenEMR.
b. Why is your organization applying to participate in Google Summer of Code 2013? What do you hope to gain by participating?
OpenEMR is currently in a unique position. With new Medicare and Medicaid requirements and legal requirements to have EMR, many small practices are feeling tremendous pressure. In TIME magazine’s March expose on Healthcare, Bitter Pill: Why Medical Bills Are Killing Us, Steven Brill even discusses how small practices are being absorbed by large Hospitals, who can undoubtedly afford the huge investment that most EMR systems require. The combination of requirements and cost is why many small practices depend on us.
The reason why we want to participate in Google Summer of Code is the same reason why so many small medical practices depend on us. We are a usable free (as in freedom) Electronic Medical Record solution that is surrounded by overly expensive proprietary solutions. Not only do we need to maintain the current OpenEMR feature set, we constantly need to navigate a complex set of laws, regulations and feature requirements that keep growing. To keep up with these changes and continue to grow, we continually need to invite new developers to join the project. Google Summer of Code will not only allow us to invite them, but entice them.
We don’t however feel that this is a one way contribution. Our mentors are experienced developers that can provide a great deal of knowledge on web development that will be immediately beneficial for students. We will guide students on how to design software from an Object Oriented perspective that is clean and reusable. Students will learn how HTML/CSS/JS/PHP/SQL/Apache all work together to deliver web applications. Students will also get real-world experience of designing software that has explicit requirements that must be met. Furthermore, students will get the experience of working with an open source team and introduced to version control systems.
We feel we that our participation in Google Summer of Code will be mutually beneficial; to us, the students, the end-users who rely on us, and to the healthcare of millions.
c. What criteria did you use to select your mentors for this year’s program? Please be as specific as possible.
The criteria we used to select our mentors were experience, accessibility, and knowledge. We achieved this by singling out the most active, experienced, and instrumental contributors to the project and asked them to participate. OpenEMR is unique software in the respects of its complex problem domain, and having experts at the intersections of medicine and software engineering is a tremendous source of pride. All of our mentors have years of experience working with OpenEMR and they would be ecstatic if given this opportunity to see the project and the students bettered through Google Summer of Code.
d. What is your plan for dealing with disappearing students?
As in medicine, the best approach to dealing with a problem is prevention. We plan on preventing disappearing students by carefully selecting those who are the most passionate about their project and nurturing them to success. Once we have carefully selected our students, we will then pair them with our experienced mentors, who are themselves crucial to the OpenEMR project. Everyone likes to feel needed, and while guiding the students to the success of their project, they will be actively engaged with the live force of ours. Furthermore, to hedge against personal issues between a mentor and their students, we will provide students with multiple contacts.
Of course, preventions have their limits. If we run into the issue of a disappearing student, the administrator will start by contacting the mentor to find out when the last engagement with the student was. If they are having any accessibility issues (or any other issues) with their mentor, the administrator will offer to have another mentor step in. Unfortunately, some students may choose to abandon their work, but we will do everything we can to help them stay interested.
e. What is your plan for dealing with disappearing mentors?
We see this as highly unlikely since the selected mentors are the most instrumental contributors to the project that have been with OpenEMR for years. If an incident were to occur, though, the administrator would contact the mentor directly and replace them if needed.
f. What steps will you take to encourage students to interact with your project’s community before and during the program?
OpenEMR is fortunate to already have many students engaged with the community, and we feel that one of the best ways to encourage additional students to interact with our community is by word of mouth between students. We are working to achieve this by actively interacting with these students on the forums, providing a developer wiki with a step-by-step introduction to committing bug fixes on GitHub, and encouraging active discussion about improvements that can be made to the project in a friendly environment. Ultimately we have tried to lower the barriers to entry to virtually zero. Once they become involved we also invite them to join in on the weekly OpenEMR voice conference call (Tuesdays at 9:30 AM PST).
Students who become involved during the program will be given multiple points of contact with direct lines of communication and assigned to personal mentors who will reach out to the students regularly.
g. What will you do to encourage that your accepted students stick with the project after Google Summer of Code concludes?
Once Google Summer of Code has ended, we will encourage students to stick with the project by doing everything we can to ensure that our student’s code/project gets into the official codebase. It’s really an awesome feeling to contribute code to a project that you know will have a direct positive impact on healthcare, which should encourage students to stick with OpenEMR after their project concludes. Additionally, having ownership of a part of the code is a nice way to motivate students to stick with the project. Our goal is to not simply have a student stick with the project, but to have the student become comfortable mentoring future new developers and students.
h. Are you a new organization who has a Googler or other organization to vouch for you? If so, please list their name(s) here.
Not applicable unless somebody knows somebody.