HospitalRun Frontend: An Open Source Software for Healthcare Facilities in the Developing World
A new dawn is here for healthcare facilities in developing countries. Thanks to the emergence of HospitalRun, an innovative Frontend project available to the public on GitHub. This project is an open source software designed to provide the most modern hospital information system tailored to meet the unique needs of underserved healthcare environments through free, open access software.
Project Overview:
HospitalRun aims to bridge the gap in healthcare delivery in the developing world by providing a feature-rich, easy-to-use hospital information management system. The project primarily targets small to medium-sized hospitals in less developed regions, where access to top-tier healthcare systems may be limited. HospitalRun seeks to address the challenge of developing robust software and hardware infrastructures in these regions, by delivering a one-click install, making world-class software accessible to medical facilities of any size.
Project Features:
HospitalRun comes endowed with an array of features designed to meet the varying needs of a modern healthcare setup, including Patients, Imaging, Medications, Labs, Incidents, and more. The project's intuitive design enables users to request and schedule appointments, make referrals, maintain patient histories, manage billing and more, all at their fingertips. The software’s reliability ensures patients’ data privacy and safety- a crucial requirement in healthcare systems. Cloud-based, it can operate offline and synchronize when internet access is available, a key feature for facilities in regions with unstable internet connectivity.
Technology Stack:
Under the hood, HospitalRun leverages a powerful technology stack to deliver these features. HospitalRun frontend leverages Ember.js, a JavaScript web framework built for ambitious web applications. Coupled with PouchDB for offline storage and CouchDB for online storage on the server-side, the project takes full advantage of JavaScript’s capabilities to provide a top-tier user experience. With regards to testing, the developers utilize the modern testing solution, Cypress.
Project Structure and Architecture:
HospitalRun's frontend adopts a modular structure. This well-organized project separates each key feature into different modules, such as patients, labs, appointments, making it easy to understand the code and contribute to the development. Its data sync between online and offline modes follows a well-architected pattern facilitated by the PouchDB and CouchDB setup, ultimately ensuring seamless data availability and integrity.
Contribution Guidelines:
The HospitalRun project warmly welcomes contributions from open-source enthusiasts, whether programmers, designers, or testers. Its comprehensive contributing guidelines include submitting bug reports via GitHub Issues and proposing new features through Pull Requests. Adherence to Ember.js conventions and the HospitalRun code style guide is necessary for code contributions. The team emphasizes the importance of effective documentation and continuous testing, thus Cypress tests are necessary for all PRs.
