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Evidence note 3 Back to paper

OpenMRS national HIV-care programs in Kenya, Rwanda, and Uganda

Sources for OpenMRS's use as national or Ministry-of-Health-mandated infrastructure in Kenya, Rwanda, and Uganda, and the role of PEPFAR funding.

Several African national HIV-care programs run on OpenMRS distributions built specifically for that purpose: KenyaEMR, developed for the AMPATH partnership and subsequently used more broadly in Kenya’s HIV response; a national HIV-care rollout in Rwanda dating to 2006; and UgandaEMR, a Ministry of Health–mandated OpenMRS distribution that started in HIV care and later expanded into maternal, child-health, and tuberculosis programs. Much of this deployment activity was funded through the U.S. President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR), which financed HIV program-monitoring infrastructure across sub-Saharan Africa and Haiti through the 2000s and 2010s.

This establishes that OpenMRS has operated at national-program scale in specific disease domains (principally HIV, later expanded to maternal/child health and TB) — not that it has operated as a general acute-care hospital system at that scale.

Sources

  1. OpenMRS, “Around the World”, OpenMRS Implementer’s Guide. Project-maintained map and summary of national and regional deployments, including Kenya, Rwanda, and Uganda.
  2. Were MC, et al., “A step-by-step approach to the strategic planning of monitoring and evaluation systems”, peer-reviewed literature describing the AMPATH/KenyaEMR context and PEPFAR-funded HIV monitoring infrastructure that OpenMRS was built to support.