An estimated 4.6 billion people worldwide lack access to essential health services. While mobile and AI have tremendous potential to help bridge the gaps, the reality is that global digital health infrastructure is fragmented, which limits the potential of these technologies to improve health outcomes, especially in low-resource environments.
That’s why in 2023, Google Research collaborated with the World Health Organization (WHO) to launch Open Health Stack, a suite of open-source tools to help developers build next-gen digital health solutions. Today, we’re announcing the next step. Google is transferring the Open Health Stack code and assets to the Linux Foundation which will launch the Open Health Stack Software Foundation (OHS-SF), to provide a community-led home for the project.
Accelerating local, community-led innovation
The OHS-SF will provide a vendor-neutral, community-governed future for the essential building blocks for global digital health. Organizations who have expressed initial support alongside Google include the WHO, Anthropic, Microsoft, Endless Health, PATH and regional health networks in Asia and Africa. In addition, Google.org is providing a $3 million grant to support the long-term growth of the project.
The foundation is also introducing a program that will allow local startups, small businesses and developers from around the world to participate directly in its governance without financial barriers.
Building on global open standards
OHS-SF will give developers the building blocks to power AI-enabled digital health solutions to help close health equity gaps. The work is organized into three pillars: FHIR foundations which includes the original OHS libraries and extends these to make it easier to work with modern standards for healthcare data; a multi-platform toolkit for reducing time to deployment; and AI commons for collaborating on projects to advance safe, effective AI. Each pillar offers a different way for developers to engage, and all are grounded in global open standards for health and AI.
