OpenHospital is a free and open-source health information management system used in hospitals across Uganda, Ethiopia, and other resource-limited regions. Built by Informatici Senza Frontiere, it manages patient records, laboratory results, pharmacy stock, and statistical reporting for healthcare workers and patients who depend on it daily.
As a team of four undergraduate students contributing to OpenHospital for the first time, we each tackled separate “good first issues” across reporting infrastructure, interface consistency, localization cleanup, and GUI data accessibility. This talk shares what we worked on and what we learned contributing to production healthcare software as first-time open source contributors.