FAQ (Frequently Asked Questions)
- Nathan Leiby (Unlicensed)
Owned by Nathan Leiby (Unlicensed)
Where did the name “Raxa” come from?
From an email correspondence with Shuro: "Raxa" is a neologism that my wife came up with. As you can see from the logo, it has the universal sign for healthcare prescription ("Rx") in it, and is phonetically close to the Hindic word "Raksha" which means to protect.
What are the reasons for building the Raxa JSS EMR rather than directly using an existing open-source system?
Creating and implementing technologies like a digital HIS and an electronic medical record (EMR) promise great benefits to all stakeholders in healthcare (patients, providers, policymakers and others) across the world. In places like rural India where healthcare is hard to deliver, trained personnel are limited and where information asymmetries are large, accessible and reliable health information promises a lot more - it can be the difference between life and death.
We designed our system from the ground up to be intuitive and responsive to the needs of overstretched providers, to enhance access and ownership to their health information by all patients including those with limited (or no) literacy, to generate real-time analytics for usage by managers and policy makers and to be extensible and customizable by anyone who chooses to use our system for their own purposes. While JSS is the initial implementation site, we hope that health systems ranging from individual provider clinics to large hospitals will find value in using the Raxa EMR, in this way unifying an opensource solution for what has been a very “siloed” problem.
We looked at many open-source projects to see if any of them could be used as a health information system (HIS) at JSS, a middle-size rural hospital with limited connectivity.
OpenMRS (www.openmrs.org), immediately stood out because of its (relatively) wide usage across the developing world and mature data model, however it was originally intended as a disease tracking system and did not have a UI for a point-of-care system. OpenVista, a point-of-care system, is also impressive but is intended for a different clinical scenario and is based on technologies that are somewhat esoteric. In the mobile health space, Motech and CommCare have powered some community health worker projects, but are not designed as a hospital information system (HIS). OpenEMR, PatientOS, GnuMed and others were also evaluated but were not good fits for the needs at JSS.
In the end, we decided to “stand on the shoulder of giants” - use and extend OpenMRS’ data model and enhance Motech’s backend for an integrated community health worker module - while building a new webapp frontend architecture designed to be “Mobile First” using widely-used technologies (HTML5/Javascript) that will power a lot of the next wave in UIs in health information systems and beyond.
We are starting by making a system that works well at JSS. Soon, we hope to implement this system at similar places in India, Africa and beyond. Eventually, we hope that many “distros” will eventually arise based on the Raxa project, and we hope and are very excited to be creating an ecosystem in this opensource space that will be of use to many in the future.
Is anyone following up on how to use I2B2 for analytics? The I2B2 project itself seems to be inactive for quite a few months now.
We are not investigating this at present.
Is there a demo site where I can try out the various features developed so far?
Not yet. but this is forthcoming. Our code is on Git and designs are on public DropBox links that we regularly broadcast via Twitter and through our public, Weekly Meeting. .
Where can I download the web/db components (and relevant installation documentation) to set it up locally?
From an email correspondence with Shuro: "Raxa" is a neologism that my wife came up with. As you can see from the logo, it has the universal sign for healthcare prescription ("Rx") in it, and is phonetically close to the Hindic word "Raksha" which means to protect.
What are the reasons for building the Raxa JSS EMR rather than directly using an existing open-source system?
Creating and implementing technologies like a digital HIS and an electronic medical record (EMR) promise great benefits to all stakeholders in healthcare (patients, providers, policymakers and others) across the world. In places like rural India where healthcare is hard to deliver, trained personnel are limited and where information asymmetries are large, accessible and reliable health information promises a lot more - it can be the difference between life and death.
We designed our system from the ground up to be intuitive and responsive to the needs of overstretched providers, to enhance access and ownership to their health information by all patients including those with limited (or no) literacy, to generate real-time analytics for usage by managers and policy makers and to be extensible and customizable by anyone who chooses to use our system for their own purposes. While JSS is the initial implementation site, we hope that health systems ranging from individual provider clinics to large hospitals will find value in using the Raxa EMR, in this way unifying an opensource solution for what has been a very “siloed” problem.
We looked at many open-source projects to see if any of them could be used as a health information system (HIS) at JSS, a middle-size rural hospital with limited connectivity.
OpenMRS (www.openmrs.org), immediately stood out because of its (relatively) wide usage across the developing world and mature data model, however it was originally intended as a disease tracking system and did not have a UI for a point-of-care system. OpenVista, a point-of-care system, is also impressive but is intended for a different clinical scenario and is based on technologies that are somewhat esoteric. In the mobile health space, Motech and CommCare have powered some community health worker projects, but are not designed as a hospital information system (HIS). OpenEMR, PatientOS, GnuMed and others were also evaluated but were not good fits for the needs at JSS.
In the end, we decided to “stand on the shoulder of giants” - use and extend OpenMRS’ data model and enhance Motech’s backend for an integrated community health worker module - while building a new webapp frontend architecture designed to be “Mobile First” using widely-used technologies (HTML5/Javascript) that will power a lot of the next wave in UIs in health information systems and beyond.
We are starting by making a system that works well at JSS. Soon, we hope to implement this system at similar places in India, Africa and beyond. Eventually, we hope that many “distros” will eventually arise based on the Raxa project, and we hope and are very excited to be creating an ecosystem in this opensource space that will be of use to many in the future.
Is anyone following up on how to use I2B2 for analytics? The I2B2 project itself seems to be inactive for quite a few months now.
We are not investigating this at present.
Is there a demo site where I can try out the various features developed so far?
Not yet. but this is forthcoming. Our code is on Git and designs are on public DropBox links that we regularly broadcast via Twitter and through our public, Weekly Meeting. .
Where can I download the web/db components (and relevant installation documentation) to set it up locally?
I'm having trouble sorting out which spaces I should be watching to track the changes in this project. I have seen too many - OpenMRS, Atlassian, Google groups, github and DropBox - and am slightly dazed.
The Getting Started Guide can help you to get accounts/details for all of our requisite tools.
We currently use
(1) Atlassian - Issue tracking (JIRA), Wiki (Confluence)
(2) Google groups - all correspondence is across our google groups. The "contributors" group is for everyone involved (but there are also specific groups by module, for UI-UX, etc).
(3) Git - Front-end code
(4) DropBox - UI/UX