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Evidence note 1 Back to paper

OpenMRS's 2004 origin at Regenstrief Institute and Partners In Health

Sources for OpenMRS's founding, the Regenstrief/AMPATH/PIH collaboration, and the year it began.

OpenMRS began in February 2004, when Paul Biondich and Burke Mamlin of the Regenstrief Institute, working on a visit to the AMPATH HIV-care partnership in Eldoret, Kenya, started building a platform to replace paper charting for HIV patients. Partners In Health’s lead developer, Darius Jazayeri, joined shortly afterward and merged PIH’s own HIV electronic-record work into the new codebase, making OpenMRS a joint project from its earliest months rather than a single institution’s tool.

This establishes the founding year, the founding institutions, and the original clinical use case (HIV care in a resource-constrained setting) that shaped the platform’s early design. It does not, on its own, establish anything about OpenMRS’s current scale or governance — those claims are sourced separately.

Sources

  1. OpenMRS, “A Brief History”, OpenMRS Implementer’s Guide. The project’s own account of its founding, naming Regenstrief Institute, AMPATH, and Partners In Health.
  2. Regenstrief Institute, “OpenMRS”. Regenstrief’s own summary of its role in originating and continuing to steward the project.