SOURCE: Pentaho Corporation

 

ORLANDO, FL--(Marketwire - 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.