JSS (people’s health support group), New Delhi, India
http://jssbilaspur.org/about/
Founded over ten years ago, JSS is a leading rural healthcare NGO in India (http://jssbilaspur.org/about/); its doctors hail from the premier teaching hospital in south Asia, AIIMS. It serves a catchment area of 300,000 through a large hospital and three rural sub-centers. The physicians at AIIMS are engaged not only in the daily requirements of medicine, surgery, etc., but also a variety of community health projects, public health interventions and research.
Founded over ten years ago, JSS is a leading rural healthcare NGO in India (http://jssbilaspur.org/about/); its doctors hail from the premier teaching hospital in south Asia, AIIMS. It serves a catchment area of 300,000 through a large hospital and three rural sub-centers. The physicians at AIIMS are engaged not only in the daily requirements of medicine, surgery, etc., but also a variety of community health projects, public health interventions and research.
Recordkeeing is a challenge at JSS. Currently records are kept in paper files that easily degrade, get lost or end up in the wrong place. To further their vision of high-quality healthcare in resource-constrained environments, the physicians have set forth the ambitious goal of transitioning from a current paper-based recordkeeping system to a health information system that operates on cloud-based servers and tablet computers. To that end, we could use some help.
The plan is not only to build an open source health information system for JSS (using OpenMRS), which involves designing, building and implementing a custom UI atop the OpenMRS database, but also to make this system freely and widely available for other organizations to implement as easily as possible. This project will undoubtedly benefit tens of thousands of people in the near term, and many more in the long term.
We are designing the system to be completely cross-platform, running on everything from pretty clunky older desktops (registration and billing modules) to new tablets (nurses and physicians). The users interact with the application through a web browser. We are building a web application using OpenMRS.
OpenMRS is a web application that runs on a Java servlet, which clients access it through a web browser. It uses basic JSP+JavaScript (jQuery UI) to generate the user interface. Experience with OpenMRS, along with web experience with Java EE, database experience with MySQL/PgSQL, UI experience with iOS/HTML5/CSS will be real plus points.
We are happy to have volunteers work with us throughout the fall semester, for a minimum of 10 hours per week.
We would also be interested in full-time volunteers coming to the JSS hospital itself and working on site in December. For a period of 3 weeks.
Daniel Pepper
JSS EMR Project Manager
+ 91 991014127
Daniel.pepper@gmail.com
MIT students who develop projects around these ideas may apply for support from the Public Service Center's Fellowships and Internships programs. Please check the program descriptions and deadlines and talk to program staff to determine which is most appropriate for your needs and project.
If you want to volunteer or you have funding from outside the PSC that enables you to work on this project, that's great! However, please do let us know if you work on a project you saw advertised here, even if you don't use our funds. And remember, the PSC staff are happy to advise on service projects even if we are not funding them ourselves.