OpenMRS and Pentaho Collaborate to Enhance Open Source Health Management

Community-Developed Electronic Medical Record System Teams With Pentaho to Develop Integrated BI and Data Warehousing Capabilities

ORLANDO, FL–(EMWNews – August 21, 2008) – Pentaho, the commercial open source alternative

for business intelligence (BI), and

Open Medical Record System (OpenMRS) , a community-developed open source

enterprise electronic medical record system, today announced collaboration

to enhance integration between the OpenMRS system and Pentaho’s open source BI suite. The

integrated system demonstrates the power of the open source model to

deliver real-world impact via community development to address user

populations that are unable to acquire or maintain traditional proprietary

medical records systems due to high software acquisition and maintenance

costs, or the need for highly trained developers.

Open Medical Record System (OpenMRS®) formed in 2004 as an open source

medical record system framework that enables the design of customized

medical records systems with little to no programming knowledge. The group

is focused on supporting developing countries where AIDS, tuberculosis, and

malaria afflict the populations. Up to 95 percent of the 40 million people

living in developing countries are infected with or dying from HIV/AIDS.

Proper prevention and treatment of HIV/AIDS requires organized

dissemination and management of countless patient details. , Traditionally,

based on factors like lack of time, developers, or money, most HIV/AIDS

programs in developing countries have managed information with simple

spreadsheets or poorly designed databases or without any computer

technology at all. OpenMRS and Pentaho have come together to improve

health management tools while reducing unnecessary, duplicative efforts.

Critical information can be handled more efficiently and effectively,

making the care providers better able to focus efforts on their patients

and address their healthcare needs.

“We are working hard to grow the OpenMRS community, since we believe this

is the best way to help patients within developing countries through a

robust and extensible medical record system foundation,” said Paul Biondich

M.D. and IT Project Lead for OpenMRS. “Pentaho brings proven open source

tools and the right expertise to help reduce the amount of redundant

efforts in collecting, managing, and analyzing health services

information.”

Pentaho allows OpenMRS sites to extract and integrate data from the OpenMRS

operational system to enable faster and more complete reporting and analysis. This kind

of capability becomes more and more important as OpenMRS installations

throughout the world scale in size and complexity. In the current phase,

the teams are working with users and community members to create data

extractions and develop analytical data models with Pentaho Data

Integration which can then be used for reporting and analysis using

Pentaho’s popular Mondrian OLAP

project.

Community members are invited to help support this important initiative by

providing feedback, or assisting with modeling or other development tasks.

Interested users and contributors can find out more at:

http://openmrs.org/wiki/Reporting_ETL_and_OLAP_Project

“This effort is a perfect example of the difference communities can make,

and a unique opportunity for open source software to help address a global

problem in a new way,” said Doug Moran, vice president of community at

Pentaho. “We look forward to working with the OpenMRS team and the

community to show the benefits that open collaboration can bring to

healthcare providers around the world.”

About OpenMRS

OpenMRS is a multi-institution, nonprofit collaborative led by Regenstrief

Institute, Inc. (http://regenstrief.org), a world-renowned leader in

medical informatics research, and Partners In Health (http://pih.org), a

Boston-based philanthropic organization with a focus on improving the lives

of underprivileged people worldwide through health care service and

advocacy. These teams nurture a growing worldwide network of individuals

and organizations all focused on creating medical record systems and a

corresponding implementation network to allow system development self

reliance within resource constrained environments. To date, OpenMRS has

been implemented in several African countries, including South Africa,

Kenya, Rwanda, Lesotho, Zimbabwe, Mozambique, Uganda, and Tanzania. This

work is supported in part by organizations such as the World Health

Organization (WHO), the Centers for Disease Control (CDC), The Rockefeller

Foundation, and the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR).

About Pentaho Corporation

Pentaho Corporation is the commercial open source alternative for Business Intelligence (BI). Pentaho Open

BI Suite provides comprehensive reporting, OLAP analysis, dashboards, data

integration, data

mining and a BI platform that have made it the world’s leading and most

widely deployed open source BI suite. Pentaho’s commercial open source

business model eliminates software license fees, providing support,

services, and product enhancements via an annual subscription. In the years

since Pentaho’s inception as the pioneer in commercial open source BI,

Pentaho’s products have been downloaded more than three million times, with

production deployments at companies ranging from small organizations to The

Global 2000. For more information, visit www.pentaho.com.