Hello Friends, I'm happy to be allowed into the group. I never knew of such a group...google doesnt seem to pick the yahoo groups?
I am an informatician with a clinical background (MBBS). I live and work in Nigeria. I believe in the open source principle and I think it is great to be with other people who share this belief. However, the digital divide is so enormous in subsaharan Africa and some other developing countries, that the presence of open source is only beginning to make some impact. Many of the open source wares require a great deal of IT knowledge. For example, installing and configuring openMRS can be an ordeal. Most IT professionals do not find the health field attractive. So, the onus many times lies on the health worker/informatician. Most of my work has been on studying the factors that influence IT adoption in health and health workers use of IT. How can we open this bridging field of informatics to the common health worker? Recently (a week ago), we set up a wiki at www.wiki.ehealthpedia.org to help co-ordinate efforts and leverage collaboration for open content for health informatics. I would like to invite members of this open community to support this knowledge-for-development approach by contributing ideas and materials to the wiki. Another related idea is to see how business models based on open- source/open-content can be leveraged on such collaborative platforms. Cheers, Dr Ime Asangansi Contibute to www.wiki.ehealthpedia.org
