Burke Mamlin

Co-Founder and Chief Architect OpenMRS

Last Reviewed: September 26, 2026

Executive Summary

Burke Mamlin is a co-founder and the chief architect of OpenMRS, an open-source medical record platform built for health systems serving underserved populations and now deployed in more than 40 countries. He is also a research scientist at the Regenstrief Institute in Indianapolis, director of its Clinical Informatics Fellowship Program, an associate professor of clinical medicine at Indiana University School of Medicine and a practising internist. OpenMRS is a community project rather than a company: its supporting nonprofit, OpenMRS Inc, reported revenue of about $1.4 million for the year to June 2025, almost all of it contributions. Its reach comes from the hospitals and ministries of health that deploy it, not from sales.

Career Highlights

• Co-founded OpenMRS with Regenstrief colleague Paul Biondich, after a February 2004 visit to the AMPATH programme in Eldoret, Kenya.
• Chief architect of OpenMRS, now deployed in more than 40 countries.
• Helped create the Medical Gopher Order Entry system, which Regenstrief calls one of the premier computerized physician order entry systems.
• Co-led the Regenstrief team that built an emergency OpenMRS-based medical record for Indianapolis Emergency Medical Services in one week during the COVID-19 crisis.
• Named director of the Regenstrief Clinical Informatics Fellowship Program in December 2021, having completed that fellowship himself.

Professional Journey

Mamlin’s career has been spent at the Regenstrief Institute, the Indianapolis medical informatics research organization. The institute describes him as involved in designing and building computer applications for medicine there for more than four decades, with a focus on physician order entry, and credits him with helping create the Medical Gopher Order Entry system. He trained in the institute’s own Clinical Informatics fellowship.

OpenMRS began in the field. In February 2004 the medical director of AMPATH in Kenya invited Mamlin to Eldoret to assess how better informatics could handle data that had outgrown AMPATH’s existing systems. He brought Paul Biondich with him. That September the two met Hamish Fraser of Partners In Health at the MedInfo conference in San Francisco, and they agreed to build together a system suited to humanitarian work in Africa and beyond. They hired developer Ben Wolfe to build a first prototype, and Partners In Health’s lead developer Darius Jazayeri merged the functions of PIH’s own EMR into it. AMPATH launched OpenMRS in Kenya in February 2006, Partners In Health took it to Rwinkwavu, Rwanda, that August, and the South African Medical Research Council switched it on at Richmond Hospital in KwaZulu-Natal at the end of that year.

Mamlin remains its chief architect. The project is run as an open community of implementers, partners and individual contributors, supported by OpenMRS Inc, an Indianapolis 501(c)(3) that provides its legal and fiscal home, infrastructure and a small global support team. Paul Biondich is listed as its executive director in its IRS filings.

His Regenstrief work has kept OpenMRS close to practice. During the COVID-19 crisis he co-led a team that used OpenMRS to build an emergency medical record for Indianapolis Emergency Medical Services and its triage centre in a week. It registered patients, captured basic clinical information and sent encounter data to the Indiana Network for Patient Care, the state’s health information exchange. In December 2021 Regenstrief named him director of its Clinical Informatics Fellowship Program. He teaches at Indiana University School of Medicine as an associate professor of clinical medicine, practises as an internist at Eskenazi Health, and lists his research interests as informatics in resource-constrained settings, precision health, decision support and open communities of practice.

Education

He holds an MD and completed the Regenstrief Clinical Informatics fellowship. No primary source found names his medical school or other degree institutions.