OpenEMR is free and open-source software subject to the terms of the GNU General Public License (GPL).

[5] [6] In the US, it has been estimated that there are more than 5,000 installations of OpenEMR in physician offices and other small healthcare facilities serving more than 30 million patients.

[7] Internationally, it has been estimated that OpenEMR is installed in over 15,000 healthcare facilities, translating into more than 45,000 practitioners using the system which are serving greater than 90 million patients.

[22] Internationally, it is known that there are practitioners in Pakistan,[23] Puerto Rico, Australia, Sweden, the Netherlands, Israel, India,[18][24] Malaysia, Nepal, Indonesia, Bermuda, Armenia, Kenya,[13][14][15][16][17][25] and Greece that are either testing or actively using OpenEMR for use as a free electronic medical records program in the respective languages.

[3][42][43] OpenEMR was originally developed by Synitech and version 1.0 was released in June 2001 as MP Pro (MedicalPractice Professional).

[47] Much of the code was then reworked to comply with the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) and to improve security, and the product was reintroduced as OpenEMR version 1.3 a year later, in July 2002.

[47] Walt Pennington, Andres Paglayan and James Perry eventually took other directions and were replaced by Brady Miller in August 2009.