OpenELIS Vietnam Progress Update

Here's an update of our progress on the development of the requirements for the Phase I milestone of OpenELIS in Vietnam.  The first two major foci of the Phase I deliverables are now at the point where they are ready to be shared with project stakeholders.  A development/demo site has been installed at the following URL:

https://openelis-dev.cirg.washington.edu/VN_APHLOpenElis/

(For access credentials, contact Jim Sibley)

The Phase I deliverables that are featured in this instance of the application are:

• Inclusion of batch specimen entry screen, allowing quick data entry for multiple specimens

• Inclusion of label printing functionality both outside and within specimen entry screens

The remaining Phase I deliverable is still currently under development:

• Modifications to individual specimen entry, i.e. limiting data entry screen to one page, allowing specimen rejection during specimen entry, etc.

Further, the effort to map the Vietnam test catalog to LOINC is continuing and very close to being complete.  Also, the deployment guide for OpenELIS Vietnam has been updated with a lot more content thanks to the diligent work of Reshma Kakkar.

OpenELIS Vietnam Progress Update

Here's an update of our progress on the development of the requirements for the Phase I milestone of OpenELIS in Vietnam.  As a reminder, the focus of the Phase I deliverables is in these three areas:

1. Inclusion of batch specimen entry screen, allowing quick data entry for multiple specimens
2. Inclusion of label printing functionality both outside and within specimen entry screens
3. Modifications to individual specimen entry, i.e. limiting data entry screen to one page, allowing specimen rejection during specimen entry, etc.

Integration of the first two of these goals is still continuing and is close to completion.  A demo site will soon be available showing off these new features.

Additionally, considerable work has been accomplished on getting the Vietnam test catalog completed and mapped to LOINC (with many thanks to Jerry Sable for his expertise and contributions).  It will soon be ready for integration into the Vietnam version of OpenELIS.

Finally, initial steps have been taken in development of a deployment guide for OpenELIS in Vietnam. A rough outline has been put together and discussions around content have begun.

OpenELIS Vietnam Progress

Here's an update of our progress on the development of the requirements for the Phase I milestone of OpenELIS in Vietnam.  The focus of the Phase I deliverables is in these three areas:

1. Inclusion of batch specimen entry screen, allowing quick data entry for multiple specimens
   
2. Inclusion of label printing functionality both outside and within specimen entry screens
3. Modifications to individual specimen entry, i.e. limiting data entry screen to one page, allowing specimen rejection during specimen entry, etc.

Development of the first two of these goals is mostly complete at this time, although there is still work required to integrate the new functionality into the existing code.  The third goal, individual specimen entry modifications, has not been started yet, but some of the work done for the batch specimen entry will be directly reusable for individual specimen entry, i.e. specimen rejection functionality.

Once the batch specimen entry and label printing functionality are fully integrated, we will make a demo version of the code available so that we can start collecting feedback on the progress made so far.

We will attempt to make regular progress updates on this blog fortnightly to keep everyone informed on the development status.

What makes things interesting - Dates

This will be the first in a series of blogs about some of the issues we run into when we are developing OpenELIS.

Before you read any further think of three different ways you can write the date of July 25th, 2012 for a French speaking audience.

Just to show off I'll give you four ways:

25-07-2012
25/7/2012
25 juil 2012
25 juillet 2012

These are all understandable by French speakers, or English speakers who know a little French (C'est moi). The problem is to make them understandable to OpenELIS.

We had a recent bug which was caused by a change in the date format of one of the analyzers we support and the fix was to have OpenELIS understand both the original format (25-07-2012) and the new format (25 juil 2012).

The programming language we use for OpenELIS, Java, has very good support for figuring out what the date is but you have to tell it what the format is first.  For instance, for the original format you would tell it that the format is the day followed by a dash followed by the month followed by a dash followed by a four digit year.  If you gave it 25/7/2012 it would not know what to do.

The format for 25-07-2012 is day-month-year
The format for 25 juil 2012 is day abbreviated month year

The first job is to figure out which date format has been sent by the analyzer, there are a couple of different ways to do this but the easiest is just to see if the date has a '-' in it, if it does then it is the original or if it does not then it is the new format.

That was easy.  But it still doesn't work for the new format.

We know which format to use but Java still can't understand '25 juil 2012'.  The reason is that Java thinks that 'juil.' is the French abbreviation for July, not 'juil'.  The extra '.' makes all the difference in the world.  That's not hard to fix, we can just add a '.' to the month and now Java is happy.  It will be able to handle the date which was causing the problem and everything should be good.  Until next March, the abbreviation for that month is 'mars', with no '.' at the end.

Fortunately that is not a hard fix and we didn't have to wait until next March to discover that only some months have a '.' at the end of the abbreviation.

Dates are very hard to get right, it is one of those things that are relatively easy for humans and very hard for computers.

After all we all know 05/10/2012 means, except that I'm not going to tell you if it was for a French speaker or an English speaker.

  

Welcome

What a boring first post...!

This blog came into being to bring together announcements about three lines of activity - three different implementations of OpenELIS Global (https://sites.google.com/site/openelisglobal/) in three countries

Haiti: http://haitilis.wordpress.com/

Cote d'Ivoire: http://cdilis.wordpress.com/

Vietnam: http://vietnamlis.wordpress.com/

Bill