OpenMRS is a scalable, modular, interoperable, open source electronic medical records platform (EMR), designed for use with other health information systems and in resource-constrained settings. Since OpenMRS’ launch in 2007, more than 6,700 healthcare clinics in over 35 countries are using OpenMRS to provide improved healthcare to 15.8 million patients. OpenMRS provides health care workers with easier and greater access to data from longitudinal patient records that can inform patient care. Increasingly, data from OpenMRS is also used by digital health leaders to inform the public health decisions needed to achieve the UN Sustainable Development Goals, measure progress towards UNAIDS’ 95-95-95 targets for HIV epidemic control, respond to outbreaks such as Ebola and COVID-19, and achieve universal health coverage.

As a result of better healthcare information technology, countries where OpenMRS is predominantly used have seen a reduction in AIDS infection rates as well as deaths of both AIDS and malaria. Countries such as Kenya, Nigeria, Mozambique, Haiti, Rwanda, and Uganda have widely adopted OpenMRS as their premier EMR platform or have declared it to be their official EMR.

OpenMRS, as an open-source project, provides a unique solution which puts local providers and patients at the center of their health information ecosystem. It allows for low-resource settings, in particular, to benefit from the contributions of others while being able to customize and “own” their own technologies. This is a foundational transformation that allows for local innovation and the development of new solutions to difficult health-related problems. When OpenMRS implementers customize the OpenMRS platform and reference application in response to local user needs and country context, the resulting OpenMRS implementation becomes an essential point-of-service system in a country's health information exchange architecture. The OpenMRS community accompanies this work with a model that supports community development, capacity building, and local ownership.

The primary OpenMRS users are the health care providers who care for patients at health care facilities in low and middle income countries. The doctors and nurses who use OpenMRS strive to deliver quality health care to patients in the shortest period of time. They seek to make the best decisions about patient care based on the information captured in the system from the moment a patient arrives at their facility to the end, when a patient leaves the facility. They look to OpenMRS to be fast and easy to navigate, to look up a complete patient record quickly, and capture patient data accurately.

In 2005, OpenMRS was initially implemented at a few facilities in Kenya, Rwanda, and South Africa with a specific focus on supporting HIV care and treatment. Since then, adoption of OpenMRS products has spread to at least 6,745 health facilities in 35+ countries. Health care workers at these facilities use OpenMRS to provide care for more than 15.8 million patients enrolled in a wide variety of programs, now including HIV, TB, maternal and child health, non-communicable diseases (NCDs), and most recently, COVID-19. For more information about the growth of OpenMRS, please see our 2021 Annual Report (https://openmrs.org/2021-openmrs-annual-report/).

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Software Application

Mozilla Public License, v. 2.0