I am proposing to make OpenEMR into a Kubernetes resource for my Capstone Project in Northwestern’s Health Informatics program.
The aim:
Make OpenEMR easier to deploy in a system like Red Hat’s OpenShift where the containers can not run as root, and rolling deployments make downtime non-existent.
Deploying OpenEMR in Kubernetes helps OpenEMR scale nicely based on demand.
Red Hat OpenShift is an enterprise Kubernetes distribution. OpenShift hides a lot of the complexity of containerization technologies. e.g., shifting from Docker to Podman.
A few goals:
Have a database container that is pre-populated with the OpenEMR schema.
Ensure OpenEMR and its components do not run as root.
Make OpenEMR as easy to deploy as possible through a single YAML file.
I could certainly use some help with this endeavor, and I will be opening a project on Github soon. If you have any interest, please let me know.
We did recently see a request to be able to look up patients with biometric data like a fingerprint.
Would that undertaking be of any interest to you? I think it would be very useful for clinics in areas with particularly migratory populations or without good population data.
Thanks, Rachel! I’ll definitely sign up for the Slack channel.
The biometric data sounds interesting. However, I’m already committed to deploying OpenEMR as a Kubernetes resource, although my advisor still needs to approve it!
The only issue I see is that I would prefer not to run containers as root. Red Hat has done a very good job of making their containers not run as root, although admittedly that means tweaking the application.
Why is running a container as a non-root user important? For starters it would allow people to run OpenEMR securely in a multi-tenet environment. i.e., any security breach wouldn’t compromise other containers on the same system.
@Ryan_Nix I’m also interested in seeing this done and we have a healthy group of folks at Red Hat that are helping. Please hit me up on slack so we can collaborate.
