MolerHealth: An Electronic Health Record Application

[Monsurat-Onabajo]

Project Lead: Onabajo Monsurat - @Monsurat-Onabajo

Mentor: Mallory Freeberg @malloryfreeberg

Welcome to OLS-8! This issue will be used to track your project and progress during the program. Please use this checklist over the next few weeks as you start Open Life Science program 🎉.

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Week 1: Meet your mentor!

• Meet mentor for 30 minutes
• Create an account on GitHub
• Check if you have access to the HackMD notes set up for your meetings with your mentor
• Prepare to meet your mentor(s) by completing a short homework provided in your shared notes
• Complete your own copy of the open leadership self-assessment and share it to your mentor
  If you're a group, each teammate should complete this assessment individually. This is here to help you set your own personal goals during the program. No need to share your results, but be ready to share your thoughts with your mentor.
• Make sure you know when and how you'll be meeting with your mentor.

Before Week 2: Cohort Call (Welcome to Open Life Science!)

• Attend call or catch up via YouTube

• Create an issue on the OLS-8 GitHub repository for your OLS work and share the link to your mentor.

• Draft a brief vision statement using your goals

  This lesson from the Open Leadership Training Series (OLTS) might be helpful

• Leave a comment on this issue with your draft vision statement & be ready to share this on the call

• Check the Syllabus for notes and connection info for all the cohort calls.

Before Week 3: Meet your mentor!

• Meet mentor
• Look up two other projects and comment on their issues with feedback on their vision statement
• Complete this compare and contrast assignment about current and desired community interactions and value exchanges
• Complete your Open Canvas (instructions, canvas)
• Share a link to your Open Canvas in your GitHub issue
• Start your Roadmap
• Comment on your issue with your draft Roadmap
• Suggest a cohort name at the bottom of the shared notes and vote on your favorite with a +1

Before Week 4: Cohort Call (Tooling and roadmapping for Open projects)

• Attend call or catch up via YouTube
• Look up two other projects and comment on their issues with feedback on their open canvas.

Week 5 and later

• Meet mentor
• Create a GitHub repository for your project
• Add the link to your repository in your issue
• Use your canvas to start writing a README.md file, or landing page, for your project
• Link to your README in a comment on this issue
• Add an open license to your repository as a file called LICENSE.md
• Add a Code of Conduct to your repository as a file called CODE_OF_CONDUCT.md
• Invite new contributors to into your work!

This issue is here to help you keep track of work as you start Open Life Science program. Please refer to the OLS-4 Syllabus for more detailed weekly notes and assignments past week 4.

Week 6

• Attend call or catch up via YouTube

Week 7

• Meet mentor

Week 8

• Attend call or catch up via YouTube

Week 9

• Meet mentor

Week 10

• Attend call or catch up via YouTube

Week 11

• Meet mentor

Week 12

• Attend call or catch up via YouTube

Week 13

• Meet mentor

Week 14

• Attend call or catch up via YouTube

Week 15

• Meet mentor

[Monsurat-Onabajo]

Vision Statement for MolerHealth:

At MolerHealth, we are pioneering a transformative shift in Nigeria's healthcare by introducing an open-source Electronic Health Records application.

Our mission is to combat the prevalent challenge of disease misdiagnosis and to ensure that every Nigerian, regardless of their location, has instantaneous access to their comprehensive health history. In a nation where fragmented, paper-based health records often lead to critical information gaps, MolerHealth seeks to be the unifying thread, bridging these gaps with the power of technology.

Our users span from individual patients to healthcare providers, all benefitting from real-time, centralised health data. Furthermore, as an open-source initiative, we invite contributions from the global community, fostering a collaborative environment to continually enhance and adapt the platform. Through MolerHealth, we envision a future where informed diagnoses, precise treatments, and enhanced patient outcomes are the norm, not the exception.

[rgiessmann]

Hi @Monsurat-Onabajo , thanks for sharing the vision statement! That is a big thing, and a worthy effort!

I was wondering whether you could share information about the current way of Health Records in Nigeria? In Europe projects like this are getting very difficult because of the Health data being sensitive data and a lot of regulation coming into play because of this. All of this might be too long for a vision statement, but I would be very interested in how you are tackling this (anonymization?), and maybe also infrastructure issues (internet connectivity) or motivation problems (why should I/a doctor enter this data).

Good luck and success with your project! 💪

[Monsurat-Onabajo]

Hi @rgiessmann ,

Thank you for your interest in our project. To provide some context on the current state of health records in Nigeria: many healthcare institutions rely on traditional, paper-based methods. This fragmented approach often means that when patients move or visit a different hospital, their comprehensive health history isn't readily available and In critical situations, this lack of immediate access to previous health records can have severe implications, including misdiagnoses or delayed treatments, sometimes even resulting in avoidable loss of life.

Our project, MolerHealth, aims to address this significant gap. We're developing a centralized platform to store these vital health records. The vision is for this platform to serve as a comprehensive repository accessible by hospitals and individual patients. Contrary to systems in some regions, given the nature of our data and the specific challenges in the Nigerian healthcare context, full anonymization of the data isn't feasible. However, we're deeply committed to ensuring data privacy and security. Access controls, encryption at rest and in transit, and stringent user authentication mechanisms are a few of the measures we will be implementing to safeguard this sensitive information.

For infrastructure issues that my arise especially in case of internet connectivity, we will be addressing this by designing MolerHealth to work offline. Data can be input and accessed without an active internet connection, and once connectivity is available, the system syncs and updates the cloud database.

We recognize the sensitivity and importance of health data, and while the path might be challenging, especially compared to standards in regions like Europe, we believe that the potential positive impact on patient outcomes in Nigeria makes it a worthy endeavor.

[marlouramaekers]

Wow, impressive vision statement! And it seems that you have given the issue of privacy and data sensitivity a lot of thought. Can I ask where you hope that the project will be at the end of OLS?

[Monsurat-Onabajo]

Thank you @marlouramaekers , we hope at the end of OLS, we will have already started building our application and it will be 50% completed

[Monsurat-Onabajo]

Our Github repository is here
Our Open canvas is here
Our Readme file is here
Our Roadmap is here

[Antonis-Koutsoumpis]

This looks like a super intesting innitiative! Hope every country builds such a database! Since health data are sensitive information, will you also need to address privacy or data management issues? For instance, besides the patients themselves, who else will have access to the data, where the data get stored, etc. If privacy is an issue, this project might provide some inspiration (even though on a differernt area of research): Verburg, M., Braukmann, R., & Mahabier, W. (2023). Making qualitative data reusable - A short guidebook for researchers and data stewards working with qualitative data. http://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.8160880

[Monsurat-Onabajo]

This looks like a super intesting innitiative! Hope every country builds such a database! Since health data are sensitive information, will you also need to address privacy or data management issues? For instance, besides the patients themselves, who else will have access to the data, where the data get stored, etc. If privacy is an issue, this project might provide some inspiration (even though on a differernt area of research): Verburg, M., Braukmann, R., & Mahabier, W. (2023). Making qualitative data reusable - A short guidebook for researchers and data stewards working with qualitative data. http://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.8160880

Hi Antonis, Thank you very much for sharing that paper. I am sure it is going to be of great help to this project but the link is broken