Technical Journal
Building in Public
Dated entries from the MMDM OpenEMR project — from the initial Linux migration through the Costa Rica field trial and toward Laredo. Filter by topic or read in order.
Leadership Briefing: Making the Case for a Digital-First Mission
The June 4 leadership meeting is the first formal ask to the board: approval, introductions, and endorsement of the HIPAA-aligned hybrid model. What is being presented and why it matters.
Post-Mission Survey Analysis: Volunteer Feedback Drives the Redesign
38 surveys sent, 14 responses. What station leads said about the forms, the workflow, and what to keep versus change before Laredo.
Building the Tech Ops Team: Recruiting for a Volunteer Mission
One person cannot sustain a mission tech operation indefinitely. Here is the role model, the recruiting approach, and why a skill-based questionnaire beats a resume call.
On-Mission Reset: Rebuild Beats Patch
When the patient-creation flow broke live in the field, the call was to reset OpenEMR in place rather than run an insecure fallback. What that decision looked like under pressure.
Costa Rica Field Trial: What the Network Taught Us
39 missionaries. 13 local translators. 11 stations. 1,121 patients in a single week — a record for MMDM's 10th anniversary Costa Rica mission. What the first full field trial looked like on the ground.
Form Design as Clinical Workflow: Building Station-Specific LBFs
Paper forms are the canonical spec. Every deviation from them requires a station lead to justify it. Here is how that discipline shaped six custom forms across five clinical stations.
Building an Offline PKI: Private CA and HTTPS Without the Cloud
A clinic LAN with no internet access still needs encrypted transport. Here is how a private certificate authority provides real TLS trust across every station device without touching a public CA.
From XAMPP to Ubuntu: Migrating a Corrupted EMR to Linux
MariaDB system tables corrupted on the Windows host. The SQL dump was intact. The decision to stop repairing and start over turned a crisis into a clean foundation.
The Hardware Arrives: TP-Link, Lenovo, and the First Real Test
The Bill of Materials was approved. The boxes arrived. The first time all the hardware was in one place and connected — a TP-Link Omada network talking to a Windows XAMPP setup that would soon be replaced.
Build vs. Buy: How We Saved $6,000 and Gained Full Ownership
A Microsoft subsidiary quoted $6,000 to configure our cloud and network infrastructure. We politely declined — and built it ourselves.
Nonprofit Infrastructure Foundations: Starting with Microsoft
Before any server was configured, the project started with a question: what resources does a 501(c)(3) have access to, and how do we use them?