Congratulations to @Stephen Senkomago Musoke on becoming the Volunteer of the Month for August! As a community, we are all grateful for Stephen’s dedication and efforts, so we asked him a few questions to get to know more about his involvement in the community and to get to know more about him.

About Stephen Senkomago Musoke

Name: Stephen Senkomago Musoke

OpenMRS ID: ssmusoke

Open

Background

Born bred and raised in Uganda, the Pearl of Africa. Been developing custom web based applications for the last 2 decades across government, finance and small & medium business clients across Africa, Europe, North America and Australia. I am currently working with University of California San Francisco a partner under the PEPFAR/CDC funded Monitoring and Evaluation Technical Support Program led by the Makerere University School of Public Health.

When you started with OpenMRS

First contact was in ThoughtWorks Kampala office where we hosted a number of meetups and the team working on the Ebola user interface for Kerrytown, Sierra Leone with MSF.

How do you participate in the community

I play multiple roles within the community: In no-particular order:

1. Reference Application Lead – where I coordinate activities driving towards the development of the reference application which showcases the capabilities of OpenMRS

2. Developer – my day-job is supporting the design, development, rollout, support, and evolution of UgandaEMR, based on OpenMRS helping to improve patient care within my home country

3. Implementer – I consider this a different hat, since in this role involves thinking about what our partners in Uganda all the way from patients, clinicians, data entry clerks, data managers, monitoring & evaluation, program management, ministry of health, and funding agencies all need from the system

4. Guide – helping to support those who develop, implement, and use OpenMRS

5. Student – I am learning from all the people doing different tasks in OpenMRS

What drives or inspires you to work with OpenMRS

OpenMRS is the tool for the work that I do day-to-day to support evidence based decision making with the aim of improving patient care. I am a geek at heart who is looking to better my country and mankind in anyway that I can using the skills and experience that I have.

What are your favorite hobbies to do in your free time

[Free time,] what is that? He he he, anyway I write a little more code (of course), spend time with my family which is a pretty big one when you consider the extensions, and try my hand at solving problems in other domains – agriculture and social activism, with or without technology.

What’s your favorite OpenMRS moment or tell us what makes OpenMRS special to you

OpenMRS is special in that it solves a very difficult problem and does it well – capturing patient data allowing it to be stored in a way that can be shared with other systems and reported. My special moment was when my first pull request was merged!!!

How has OpenMRS helped you achieve any of your personal goals

I am doing my part in bettering humanity through health, and the OpenMRS community is helping me achieve that. I know that what I put in is very small compared to what I get from it, but I am hoping to reverse that trend soon. As a developer I have learned a lot from the architectural decisions and design approaches within the core code and modules, also while extending the project to meet different needs.

Thank you again to Stephen Senkomago Musoke for all his work and for sharing his story with the community!