My MSc Project

(Published in 2011)

I am Dr M H B Ariyaratne. I am a trainee for MSc (Biomedical Informatics) at Postgraduate Institute of Medicine, University of Colombo, Sri Lanka. This blog was mainly developed as a self-assessment tool for me on the progress of my project. This will help my supervisors and examiners to have an evaluation of my work. This blog will also help the internet users to get some details related to health informatics, bioinformatics, software development and general facts on medicine and IT.

Title:

Development and Implementation of a module for OpenMRS to address the unmet needs of the Geneticists.

Supervisors:

Prof. Vajira D. W. Dissanayake
Dr. (Mrs.) Nilakshi Samaranayake

Objectives:

The general objective of my project is to introduce the concept of a platform where there is interactive participation and collaboration of general public, genealogists, geneticists, clinicians and researchers to store, retrieve and analyze personal, demographic, genealogical, clinical, laboratory and sequential data.
My specific objective is to develop a module for OpenMRS, which will add the above capabilities to the existing open-source platform.

Methodology

I will create an OpenMRS ID and sign up for the developer and implementer mailing lists. I will also start using the OpenMRS Community RSS Feed.
Then I will configure the Eclipse environment which will be used as the IDE. Then I will start creating my first OpenMRS module. I can click “Request Code Review” and a core developer will get me some feedback.
The development of the project is planned to follow the Spiral modal of software design. At the onset system requirements are defined in as much detail as possible after interviewing geneticists, clinicians, genealogists and the general public. A preliminary design is created initially which is a scale-down system which represents an approximation of the characteristics of the final product. The first prototype will be evaluated to identify the strengths, weaknesses and risks, where the feedback will be used to build the next prototype. The same process will be repeated as necessary until a thoroughly evaluated and tested final system is developed. Afterwords routine maintenance is carried out on a continuing basis to prevent large-scale failures and to minimize downtime.
The final product will be a module that can be included in the OpenMRS core modules. Client tire and application tire will be mainly developed using Java Enterprise Edition. JavaScript, CSS, and Ajax will also be utilized in developing client tire architecture. The data tire is built on my-SQL which will be connected to application tire through Hibernation technology all of which are the standards for OpenMRS.

Deliverables

• Project Proposal
• Project Management Plan
• Project Schedule
• Software Requirements Specification
• Software Design Description
• Implementation Model: Code and System
• Module to be incorporated for the OpenMRS
• Software Quality Assurance Plan
• User Manual