A Doctor Learns How to Code Through Open Source Judy Gichoya is a medical doctor from Kenya who became a software developer after joining the open source medical records project, OpenMRS. The open source project creates medical informatics software that helps health professionals collect and present data to improve patient care in developing countries. After seeing how effective the open medical records system was at increasing efficiency and lowering costs for clinics in impoverished areas of Africa, she began hacking on the software herself to help improve it. Then she set up her own implementation in the slums outside Nairobi, and has done the same for dozens of clinics since. This is a classic story of open source contributors, who join in order to scratch an itch. But Gichoya was a doctor, not a programmer. She started talking to people about how they conducted care for their patients, and that’s when she discovered the AMPATH Medical Record System (AMRS), a program to support HIV prevention and treatment in Africa. She got involved with the program and started learning how to code to help with openMRS, an open source project started by two doctors at Indiana University School of Medicine to help scale the AMRS software to serve more clinics in developing countries. Three years later in 2009, when she graduated from medical school, she still had no idea what open source actually was, despite being involved with openMRS for AMRS. It was only in 2010 when she did her own implementation of openMRS that she came to understand the value of open source. Read how she did it at http://ift.tt/2eFNzd9
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