This Blog post is meant to give an update about my experience with OpenMRS as we start this year's Google Summer of Code. The community bonding period is about three weeks long and it is meant to give the student the opportunity to interact with the opensource community and above all get to know his/her mentors, get themselves involved in the project they are supposed to work on when the coding period begins by reading documentation, code and any other related material.
Abstract
OpenMRS is an open source software project that offers an EMR that ensures patient care is a seamless process. As an open source community, the warmth is felt the moment you introduce yourself since there are so many people willing to spare a moment or two in order to show you around. That's the same culture Incase one has an issue to raise or a blocker.
About the Project:
Name: Add Support For FHIR Patch Operations
Description: OpenMRS is using the FHIR API more and more in place of the REST API. However, the FHIR API is, by default, quite verbose. Supporting PATCH operations would allow us to support partial updates to FHIR resources without needing to send the whole resource from the client to the server.
Mentors: Ian Bacher and Abert Namanya
Community Period
OpenMRS community is very open and welcoming. Community members have lots of experience and knowledge. They always ready to help you, especially when you are a beginner. They provide you the resources and guide you as well.
I have been in touch with my project mentors and we have created a recurring weekly meeting to meet and digest the project even more. During this period, i have gone through the available resources on patch operations and how various FHIR implementations have implemented them. I have also had the chance to read the entire OpenMRS Fhir2 Module documentation and codebase so that i can get to understand what is taking place in the implementation of HL7/FHIR Standards by OpenMRS.
I have created an Epic in JIRA to track all the tickets that i will be working on throughout this whole coding period. The Epic can be found at https://issues.openmrs.org/browse/FM2-573
Cheers and Happy coding!
Resources
- https://talk.openmrs.org/t/add-support-for-fhir-patch-operations/39042
- https://wiki.openmrs.org/display/RES/Summer+of+Code+2023#:~:text=FHIR%3A%20Add%20support%20for%20FHIR%20PATCH%20operations%20%C2%A0
- https://github.com/openmrs/openmrs-module-fhir2
- https://hapifhir.io/hapi-fhir/docs/server_plain/rest_operations.html#instance-level-patch
- https://docs.google.com/document/d/14g2EddqKIpon3xXI71BMKXfu5zISIy6Psy9NgCp4t6Q/edit?usp=sharing
