Our Contribution

Our faculty and staff helped create one of the first truly scalable electronic medical record (EMR) systems in Sub-Saharan Africa. The Mosoriot Medical Record System (MMRS) was first created and installed within a rural clinic in Eastern Africa, and later the AMPATH Medical Record System (AMRS) was created as the next generation EMR focusing primarily on supporting the IU-Kenya Partnership’s goal of preventing and treating HIV/AIDS in Kenya. AMRS later led to the development of Open Medical Record System (OpenMRS).

Regenstrief, in collaboration with Partners In Health (Boston) and MRC (South Africa), found OpenMRS – an open source effort to build a framework for electronic medical records in resource constrained environments.  Much of the design for the OpenMRS project was gleaned from Regenstrief’s decades of experience with electronic medical record systems.

With the success of OpenMRS, GHI was solicited to lead a new open source community, called the Open Health Information Exchange (OpenHIE). The OpenHIE initiative emerged from the Health Informatics Public Private Partnership (HIPPP) initiative funded by the US President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR).  The partnership originated to support development of the Rwanda Health Enterprise Architecture (RHEA) project — a shared EMR created for expectant mothers visiting antenatal clinics in Rwanda’s Rwamagana district. Through the RHEA project, OpenHIE brought together community processes, broad reaching experience, and a series of reusable technologies to establish an infrastructure for strengthening national health information exchanges for the underserved.