mitre/nightingale repository overview

⁠Nightingale EDRS Prototype

Nightingale is a prototype electronic death registration system (EDRS), built to both demonstrate basic EDRS capabilities and act as a foundation for exploring next generation EDRS concepts. This prototype represents a work-in-progress, and is expected to change and grow over time in response to feedback from subject matter experts and users. Nightingale ERDS currently supports the following functionality at various degrees of maturity:

• User roles for funeral directors, medical certifiers, registrars, and administrators
• Death record data entry
• Validation of death record data using VIEWS
• Basic support for configurable, flexible workflows, such as
  • Determining who can initiate a death record
  • Assignment of in-process death records to other system users
  • Token based login for medical certifiers who are infrequent system users
• Workflow and Death record versioning
• Support for structured data entry, minimizing opportunities for user error
• Auditing of user actions
• Export of records in IJE format
• Basic issuance and archival of death certificates
• Basic reports on system usage patterns
• Basic reports on collected mortality data

⁠Installation and Setup for Development or Testing

Nightingale EDRS is a Ruby on Rails application that uses the PostgreSQL database for data storage.

For information on how to deploy Nightingale as a Docker container, see CONTAINERDEPLOY.md⁠.

⁠Prerequisites

To work with the application, you will need to install some prerequisites:

• Ruby⁠
• Bundler⁠
• Postgres⁠

Once the prerequisites are available, Nightingale can be installed and demonstration data can be loaded.

⁠Setup/Running

⁠Easy

A Dockerized⁠ version of Nightingale for experimental purposes has been published to Docker Hub. For instructions on how to run in Docker, please see CONTAINERDEPLOY.md⁠.

⁠Hard

You can also build and deploy Nightingale from scratch:

• Retrieve the application source code

  git clone https://github.com/nightingaleproject/nightingale.git

• Change into the new directory

  cd nightingale

• Install ruby using rbenv⁠ or rvm⁠

  rbenv install or rvm install $(cat .ruby-version)

• Install ruby gem dependencies

  bundle install

• Create the database

  bundle exec rake db:setup

• Set up system with demonstration data

  bundle exec rake nightingale:demo:setup

  • This will initialize Nightingale with demonstration data, such as:
    • Demo user accounts (all with a password of 123456):
      • Two funeral director users ([email protected]⁠, [email protected]⁠)
      • Two physician users ([email protected]⁠, [email protected]⁠)
      • Two medical examiner users ([email protected]⁠, [email protected]⁠)
      • Two registrar users ([email protected]⁠, [email protected]⁠)
      • An administrator user ([email protected]⁠)
    • Two demo workflows:
      • A simple workflow where a funeral director initiates a record
      • A simple workflow where a physician initiates a record
    • U.S. geographical data, used for structured data input

To support consuming and producing IJE and FHIR records using Nightingale, you must be running the vrdr-dotnet microservice (this step is not necessary if you are using the Dockerized version of Nightingale). For instructions on setting up and running this, please see https://github.com/nightingaleproject/vrdr-dotnet#vrdrhttp⁠.

⁠Tasks

• Manage user accounts

  • Create a user

    bundle exec rake nightingale:users:create EMAIL=<email_address> PASS=<password>

  • List all currently registered users (and their roles)

    bundle exec rake nightingale:users:list

  • Delete a user

    bundle exec rake nightingale:users:delete EMAIL=<email_address>

  • Grant a user admin privileges

    bundle exec rake nightingale:users:grant_admin EMAIL=<email_address>

  • Revoke admin privileges from a user

    bundle exec rake nightingale:users:revoke_admin EMAIL=<email_address>

  • Add a role to a user

    bundle exec rake nightingale:users:add_role EMAIL=<email_address> ROLE=<role>

• Update system workflows

  bundle exec rake nightingale:workflows:build

• Run the tests

  bundle exec rake db:drop db:create db:migrate RAILS_ENV=test (creates test DB, needed first time only) bundle exec rake test

• Run the application server

  bundle exec rails server

  The server will be running at http://localhost:3000/⁠

⁠Version History

This project adheres to Semantic Versioning⁠.

Releases are documented in the CHANGELOG⁠.

⁠License

Copyright 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020 The MITRE Corporation

Licensed under the Apache License, Version 2.0 (the "License"); you may not use this file except in compliance with the License. You may obtain a copy of the License at

http://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0

Unless required by applicable law or agreed to in writing, software distributed under the License is distributed on an "AS IS" BASIS, WITHOUT WARRANTIES OR CONDITIONS OF ANY KIND, either express or implied. See the License for the specific language governing permissions and limitations under the License.

⁠Contact Information

For questions or comments about Nightingale EDRS, please send email to

[email protected]