Google, WHO and a global coalition support new Foundation designed to close health equity gaps through open, AI-ready infrastructure

Summary

The Linux Foundation announced its intent to launch the Open Health Stack Software Foundation, the neutrally governed home for open source software used to build AI-enabled digital health applications.
Google will contribute the Open Health Stack project, including all code and assets, to the new Foundation as well as a $3 million grant from Google.org.
More than 20 organizations across enterprise tech, nonprofit, healthcare, and research verticals expressed support for the Foundation and its goal to enable developers worldwide, especially in low- and middle-income countries, to build interoperable, AI-ready health systems.

The Linux Foundation, the nonprofit organization enabling mass innovation through open source, today announced its intent to launch the Open Health Stack Software Foundation (OHS-SF). The new Foundation will provide a vendor-neutral, community-led home for the open source software tools developers use to build AI-enabled digital health solutions.

Digital health infrastructure remains fragmented, creating barriers to interoperability and limiting adoption of emerging technologies across health systems. OHS-SF is designed to address this challenge by providing developers with standards-based, community-governed tools needed to build interoperable health applications, drive local innovation and help close health equity gaps - particularly in resource-constrained areas.

"Open source has already transformed enterprise software, cloud computing, and AI, and it will do the same for how the world delivers care," said Jim Zemlin, CEO of the Linux Foundation. "The Open Health Stack Software Foundation brings together the global community of developers, health organizations, and implementers under a vendor-neutral, community-governed home, ensuring that the tools powering tomorrow's AI-enabled health systems are built in the open, for everyone."

Grounded in global open standards, the Foundation will support three primary technical pillars: 1) core HL7 FHIR foundations; 2) the "OHS Player," a multiplatform reference toolkit for local deployments; and 3) AI Commons, a neutral, model-agnostic space for enabling safe, effective and verifiable AI in global health co-developed with the World Health Organization (WHO).

Launched in 2023 with Google, the Open Health Stack project now includes a global ecosystem of developers and implementers. Google will contribute the project to the Foundation, including the code and underlying Open Health Stack assets. To support the Foundation, Google.org is providing a $3 million grant, helping drive long-term growth and implementation.

"We built Open Health Stack because we wanted to put the developers and community health care workers serving people on the edges of care back at the center of development and give them access to world-class tools for building next-gen digital health solutions," said Kat Chou, Vice President at Google Research. "Contributing OHS to the Linux Foundation, with the support of WHO and a growing global community, ensures these building blocks will continue to evolve - now extending into AI for Global Digital Health - under governance that reflects the diversity of the communities they serve. OHS-SF makes it easier for developers everywhere to innovate on the next generation of digital health applications, and we're proud to support its long-term success."

Organizations that have expressed initial support for the Foundation include (in alphabetical order): Argusoft, Anthropic, Asia eHealth Information Network (AeHIN), the Center for Global Digital Health Innovation at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, Clinton Health Access Initiative, Endless Health, Google, HELINA, IntelliSOFT Consulting Limited, IPRD Solutions, Jacaranda Health, Khushi Baby, Medtronic Labs, Madiro, Microsoft, Nawi Tech, Ona, OpenMRS, PATH, The Agency Fund, The Summit Institute for Development, and the World Health Organization, as well as advisory support from UNICEF.

To ensure developers from low- and middle-income countries can participate directly in governance, OHS-SF is introducing an Implementer Program. This initiative allows small businesses, local consulting firms, and pre-revenue startups to join and shape the project direction without financial barriers.

OHS-SF is now open for participation. Visit the foundation website and explore the project repositories to become a member and help shape the future of open digital health infrastructure.

Supporting Quotes
"Open, interoperable and locally adaptable digital infrastructure is essential for building sustainable health systems at scale. Through MEDPlat, our open source digital health platform, Argusoft has supported the implementation of standards-based health solutions across diverse and resource-constrained settings. This experience has shown us how shared standards, reusable technology and strong implementer communities can accelerate innovation while strengthening local ownership. Argusoft is proud to support the Open Health Stack Software Foundation and contribute towards an open, community-governed ecosystem that enables countries and developers to build trusted, AI-ready digital health solutions."
- Sethuraman Venkatraman, President of HealthTech, Argusoft

"Interoperability has always been the bridge between innovation and impact in health systems. The launch of the Open Health Stack Software Foundation is a milestone for our region, as AeHIN has long championed open standards and community-owned digital health solutions to close equity gaps across Asia. A vendor-neutral, standards-based home for tools built on HL7 FHIR - and one that brings AI into the fold responsibly through AI Commons - speaks directly to what AeHIN has been advocating: interoperable, locally adaptable systems that put people, not platforms, at the center of care. This also reflects what we've been working on through our capacity-building, technical assistance efforts and digital health convergence workshops - local ownership over the tools and standards that power national health systems. We look forward to engaging with this Foundation."
- Jai Ganesh Udayasankaran, Executive Director, Asia eHealth Information Network

"Standards-based, modular open architecture is what allows countries to own and operate their digital health stack end-to-end, without depending on external systems they can't easily adapt or maintain. That technical autonomy shortens the runway from prototype to clinical and public health deployment. It lowers the risk of implementation failure, derisking donor and government investment, while opening the door for local private sector engagement by shortening the pathway to market. As AI becomes the next layer of this stack, these principles become more essential."
- Smisha Agarwal, Director, Center for Global Digital Health Innovation at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health

"The OHS-SF is coming at the right time, bringing together key partners, from leading technology companies to the World Health Organization, to build the open source, community-managed tools we need for AI in global health to succeed. This initiative is directly in line with the AI Commons for Global Health initiative that CHAI is helping to steward and we look forward to close collaborations."
- Ben Brockman, Senior Director of AI, Clinton Health Access Initiative

"The scale and impact of AI in health will ultimately be limited not by compute, but by the quality of our shared knowledge infrastructure. The Open Health Stack Software Foundation could provide exactly the kind of shared space and infrastructure the field needs - open enough for any developer to contribute to and for any health system to build on, and governed collectively so that it can be trusted. Endless Health is proud to support the creation of this important foundational infrastructure for global digital health."
- Rubayat Khan, Director, Endless Health

"Productive utilization of digital health engineering competencies requires thoughtfully designed, fit-for-purpose tools. The OHS Software Foundation pragmatically enables HELINA to support open, standards-based innovation and more effective capacity building in Africa."
- Steven Wanyee, Chair, HELINA Advisory Council

"At Summit Institute for Development, we have successfully implemented Open Health Stack tools to enable OpenSRP 2 functioning within Indonesia's national and regional health system, achieving interoperability that is now locally adopted and financed by government resources for a population of 2.9 million, with potential scaling to 514 districts nationwide. This milestone demonstrates sustainability and ownership at the subnational level, while laying the foundation for national and global scaling. With AI-enabled capabilities being integrated, OHS is proving to be a transformative, vendor-neutral platform that empowers frontline health workers, strengthens continuity of care, and ensures equity in digital health."
- Yuni Dwi Setiyawati, CEO, Summit Institute for Development

"Open Health Stack, as a Digital Public Good, helps countries access digital health ecosystems that are more accessible, safer and more inclusive. Every year millions of children remain invisible to the health systems meant to serve them, not because the tools do not exist, but because the conditions for those tools to scale and be sustained do not. UNICEF's unique role of helping governments translate global standards into digitally-enabled health services at primary care and community level hinges on countries' ability to access and deploy open, interoperable, digital solutions, from the point-of-care to the Health Information Exchange architecture. The Open Health Stack Software Foundation puts those foundations under community governance as digital public goods, lowering the barrier for every country to access and build digital ecosystems that find, reach and follow every child, including the most marginalized."
- Sean Blaschke, Senior Adviser, Health, UNICEF

"WHO's normative work, from SMART Guidelines to the WHO-ITU Reference Architecture for Digital Public Infrastructure, is built on the conviction that robust code and open interoperability standards like HL7 FHIR and ICD are not technical preferences but the precondition for health equity at scale. The Open Health Stack Software Foundation operationalizes that conviction in code. By providing community-maintained, standards-conformant libraries and toolkits, it lowers the cost of doing the right thing for every developer building health solutions, and it signals to countries and development partners that sustainable and interoperable digital health infrastructure is achievable today, and primed for the next wave of verifiable AI for health sector goals."
- Alain Labrique, Director, World Health Organization Department of Data, Digital Health, Analytics and Artificial Intelligence

About the Linux Foundation
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