OpenMRS website

OpenMRS is a global community that has developed an open-source Electronic Medical Record system (EMR), created to support healthcare in low and middle-income countries. It serves as a replacement for traditional, paper records, improving the workflow inside of a healthcare facility, as well as the quality of diagnosis and treatments. As result, it enables medical workers to successfully treat even more people and save even more lives.

Spectrum of a Project

Our Goal

Creating a new website for OpenMRS, so that it is functional and modern-looking.

Challenges

There was a lot of content that required selecting, rewriting and reorganizing.The process of making any decisions was slowed down by the number of people involved.

Our strategy

Creating a collaborative team of people from both our Foundation and OpenMRS, to work together on the project.
Reviewing current website content and preparing the new architecture.
Establishing personas that are most likely to visit OpenMRS website, to match the design and the content to their needs.
Collecting opinions from the people in OpenMRS Community on what web design solutions they approve of, and what they do not like.
Building the new website’s first version on our Foundation’s domain, in order to facilitate the work.
Moving the finished website to the target domain.

The Case

Time flies, things change and the same goes for trends. Websites that have been built a few years ago are now outdated and hard to use. Nowadays, sites are built in a modern way, utilizing the newest technology and trends.

The curse of an outdated website is what happened to one of our partners, OpenMRS. Their website was unattractive and disorganized. It contained a lot of unnecessary elements and duplicate sections. The website has not been updated in a long time and its whole structure required to be rebuilded. And we have decided to take up the challenge!

We started our work by discussing content of the website and establishing the new website architecture. We also described personas who visit our website or who we want to encourage to visit it. In the collaborative spirit of open source transparency we discussed our ideas and opinions with members of the OpenMRS Community. Hearing their voice on the matter was very important, because the website is only an addition to their hard work on the software. If not for them, OpenMRS would not even exist.

So we asked for opinions and considered their voices. However, sometimes too many cooks can spoil the broth… And we felt that strongly during this project. We could not meet any deadlines, constantly too caught up in debates and discussions that seemed to have no end and no final conclusions.

Eventually, we have decided to take matters into our own hands. Based on the many discussions with OpenMRS Community members, we have created the first version of the new website on our own domain. We predicted that it will be a lot easier to continue our work, once we have the first draft ready and can apply changes on an existing website, rather than theorize about it. And it worked! We have successfully created the website and its design was met with enthusiasm from the Community. After additional technical works, we finally moved the finished website to the target domain

We have learned a lot while working on this project. It was a great pleasure to collaborate with such an amazing community and to create something really useful together. We are certain that the new website will contribute to the success of OpenMRS, and will proudly represent this great open-source project in the world of digital health.