David Haider
The clinician who deployed it in Bolton, on where the benefit comes from and what the model costs to sustain.
Part of the OpenEyes Conference interview series, recorded on 16 September 2026 in Cardiff, UK.
Clinician-Led Deployment and Governance of OpenEyes at Bolton
It's the custodian model that I think has provided the bulk of the benefit that we have reaped, not the open source nature of it.
About David Haider
David Haider is a consultant ophthalmologist in Bolton and Chief Clinical Information Officer for that organisation, and chairs the OpenEyes committee at Apperta.
Interview summary
He nearly read computer science and chose medicine instead, building information tools for ophthalmology as a trainee. He first saw OpenEyes around 2010 in a teaching session at Manchester Eye Hospital, presented by the Moorfields consultant who started it. Appointed to Bolton in 2013, he was expected to sort out an eye unit whose cameras and scanners were unconnected and unbacked-up, with no electronic record in prospect.
His evaluation covered four options, including the main ophthalmic competitor and a system that simply scanned paper. OpenEyes won on a friendly interface and, more decisively, on a willingness to build what the unit needed. The others told him new features were not on the roadmap. The turning point was a person - a new head of IT, experienced and pro open source, who knew how to apply for central funding he knew nothing about. Until then his experience of hospital IT had been "computer says no". With her help the unit won an award covering hardware, the software, servers and the change requests needed to deploy.
On why it kept working: a community of technologically comfortable ophthalmic clinicians in regular contact, and an iterative design process running from conversation to wireframe to build. He says no other software he uses lets him contribute that actively, and that people in the room can point at parts of the product and say they made them. On funding he is concrete: Moorfields currently carries the lion's share and everyone gets those features at no extra cost, and he gives his own example of two units jointly paying to build strabismus tooling that then reached every site.
On the weakness he names money. Apperta prioritises the product and is, in his words, appalling at making money, and he describes periods when that felt precarious. What has helped is a percentage of every change request now going to Apperta to pay for the unglamorous work - replatforming, security, dependencies - that no hospital will ever ask for. His advice to anyone deploying any clinical system is the same: have clinicians in the management structure permanently, not just for deployment.