A coherent, practical case for an open, sustainable digital health ecosystem, designed to be read in order.
This library sets out a practical case for an open, sustainable digital health ecosystem. It combines foundational framing with operational playbooks, investment logic and governance guidance, and it explains what is broken, what must change, and how organisations can act without reinventing standards, platforms or institutions.
Read it in order. The first documents establish shared understanding. The later ones provide the tools to govern, fund, implement and sustain change.
Foundational documents first. These establish the shared framing used throughout.
Bert Verdonck, Jaana Sinipuro and Stuart Mackintosh
Establishes what the Digital Health Commons is, why open source alone is insufficient, and how shared governance and stewardship enable sustainable, trustworthy digital health.
DownloadHanna Pohjonen and David Jobling
Diagnoses systemic failures in digital health, including fragmentation, lock-in and weak governance, explaining why well-funded initiatives repeatedly fail to deliver lasting value.
DownloadDavid Jobling
Introduces custodians as the missing organisational layer, showing how accountable, locally grounded stewardship sustains open systems, standards and public value over time.
DownloadEleven clinicians, architects and implementers
Eleven conversations recorded at EHRCON24 with the people who have spent careers on open health records: what is broken, why, and what they have already built in response. No paywall and no sign-up.
Watch the series →Written in Spring 2023, this is the argument the Forum was founded on: the problem stated by stakeholder group, the ambition, the case for custodians, and the route from launch to systemic change. It predates the library above and is kept as the record of where the work started.
Read the thesis →