Effortlessly transforming data structures
OpenMRS is a collaborative open-source medical record system designed to support the delivery of health care in developing countries. Currently in use by many PEPFAR supported countries to support the delivery of HIV services (including Rwanda, Uganda, Kenya, Nigeria and Namibia), one key challenge over the years has been reporting, as the internal data structures of OpenMRS require manual "transposing" of data, which is cumbersome, laborious and error-prone. Because developers usually don’t do this (they instead choose to report on the internal OpenMRS data structures directly) reporting has been slow.
We had long wanted to automate our report generation, but our efforts were frustrated due to the challenges in the structure of the underlying OpenMRS data. With MambaETL, we have been able to develop a drag and drop report generation tool on top.
UgandaEMR, Uganda
In response, as part of the CDC-funded Technical Assistance Project, UCSF and its partners, Makerere University School of Public Health and University of Nairobi, created an innovative solution, MambaETL, that automatically transforms data structures into a format that makes reporting easier and faster without requiring developers to do much work: developers simply specify which tables and columns they need, and MambaETL takes care of the rest. Before MambaETL, simple queries for health data reports could take many hours (or even days) to run.
Streamlining the OpenMRS reporting process
MambaETL automatically supports the restructuring of OpenMRS data tables into a friendly reporting format that enables more efficient analysis using choice analysis tools and extremely fast report generation. The process involves transforming data from long to wide column-based tables as shown in figure 1. MambaETL stores the results of these transformations and prepares the data for further analysis and visualization. MambaETL is agnostic of any analysis/visualization tools — meaning end users can use a reporting tool of their choice, including the popular Apache Superset or even within OpenMRS itself.
Piloting MambaETL with Rwanda Ministry of Health
Today, MambaETL is being piloted with the Rwanda Ministry of Health. With reporting in OpenMRS now easier and faster, monthly billing reports that once took hours or even days to display, now take a matter of seconds.
The first stable version of MambaETL has now been released as an OpenMRS community product. Read the v1.0.0 release announcement and review the source code on GitHub.
We are simply amazed by this new tool!
Rwanda Ministry of Health
