About

With the award from The President's Challenge, a partnership between faculty from Marquette University and community agents in Milwaukee plans to open a new mental health clinic, the Next Step Clinic. Hosted by the Next Door Foundation, the Next Step Clinic aims to address the mental health and developmental needs of Milwaukee's underserved children and families, according to a press release from Marquette University (link). The funds will kickstart the hiring process for the clinic, but there are still other needs which the proposal does not explicitly include. The proposal's budget lists Cloud storage for data systems but not the overhead and setup costs.

Our team of graduate students in Computer Science intends to deploy an Electronic Medical Record (EMR) for Next Step Clinic in Milwaukee, WI. Such a system provides a simple, portable interface for patient records, appointment management, and other such tasks. This team will employ an existing open source project, OpenEMR, on a customized platform for the clinic. Patient data will be stored in its own database, which will be chosen to suit the needs of the clinic. Feature specification will be determined through requirements gathering, specifically through careful interviews and personal interaction. The success of this endeavor will be indicated by the usefulness of the product, as measured by daily active users, number of records accessed/exchanged per day, and the success of the clinic itself.