OpenMRS Overview

Our world continues to be ravaged by a pandemic of epic proportions, as over 40 million people are infected with or dying from HIV/AIDS — most (up to 95%) in developing countries. Prevention and treatment of HIV/AIDS on this scale requires efficient information management, which is critical as HIV/AIDS care must increasingly be entrusted to less skilled providers. Whether for lack of time, developers, or money, most HIV/AIDS programs in developing countries manage their information with simple spreadsheets or small, poorly designed databases...if anything at all. To help them, we need to find a way not only to improve management tools, but also to reduce unnecessary, duplicative efforts.

As a response to these challenges, Open Medical Record System (OpenMRS^®) formed in 2004 as a open source medical record system framework for developing countries — a tide which rises all ships. OpenMRS is a multi-institution, nonprofit collaborative led by Regenstrief Institute, Inc. (http://regenstrief.org), a world-renowned leader in medical informatics research, and Partners In Health (http://pih.org), a Boston-based philanthropic organization with a focus on improving the lives of underprivileged people worldwide through health care service and advocacy. These teams nurture a growing worldwide network of individuals and organizations all focused on creating medical record systems and a corresponding implementation network to allow system development self reliance within resource constrained environments. To date, OpenMRS has been implemented in several African countries, including South Africa, Kenya, Rwanda, Lesotho, Zimbabwe, Mozambique, Uganda, and Tanzania. This work is supported in part by organizations such as the World Health Organization (WHO), the Centers for Disease Control (CDC), The Rockefeller Foundation, and the President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR).

OpenMRS is an application which enables design of a customized medical records system with no programming knowledge (although medical and systems analysis knowledge is required). It is a common framework upon which medical informatics efforts in developing countries can be built. The system is based on a conceptual table structure which is not dependent on the actual types of medical information required to be collected or on particular data collection forms and so can be customized for different uses.

OpenMRS is based on the principle that information should be stored in a way which makes it easy to summarize and analyze, i.e. minimal use of free text and maximum use of coded information. At its core is a concept dictionary which stores all diagnosis, tests, procedures, drugs and other general questions and potential answers. OpenMRS is a client-server application which means it is designed to work in an environment where many client computers access the same information on a server.

At the moment much of the information on these pages is aimed at programmers/developers; however an aim is to provide comprehensive information for:

• Programmers/developers: The people who do the actual programming of the application and who have designed and modify the table structure.
• Implementers: The people who decide what sort of medical records need to be collected at a particular health facility. They use the application to adjust the concept dictionary as required and to design forms to collect this information. Ideally the designers for a particular health facility should be a team of systems analysts who understand the conceptual structure of the system and clinicians who understand medicine and their own health facility’s medical record information requirements.
• Users: The people use the system to enter, retrieve and analyze information in the system in their particular health facility.

There are several layers to the system:

1. The OpenMRS data model borrows heavily from the Regenstrief model, which has over a 30-year history of proven scalability and is also based on a concept dictionary
2. The API (application programming interface) provides a programmatic wrapper around the data model, allowing developers to program against more simplified method calls rather than having to understand the intricacies of the data model
3. The Web Application includes web front-ends and modules that extend the core functions — these are the user interfaces and applications themselves built upon the lower levels

Community

OpenMRS is also a community of developers, implementers, and users working toward a shared and open foundation for managing health information in developing countries.

Learn more about the OpenMRS Community

Contact Us

For general questions:

There are several channels to reach the OpenMRS Community, such as mailing lists, our forum, or the OpenMRS IRC channel.

For media inquiries:

Please contact press@openmrs.org