Google Hands Open Health Stack To the Linux Foundation

BrianFagioli writes: The Linux Foundation intends to launch the Open Health Stack Software Foundation, a new vendor-neutral home for the Google Open Health Stack project. Google is contributing the project code and assets while Google.org is providing a $3 million grant. The initiative is also backed by Microsoft, Anthropic, and the World Health Organization, with the goal of building open source, AI-ready digital health infrastructure. Will moving the project under Linux Foundation governance accelerate adoption, or is this simply another foundation that most developers will never interact with? The new project will focus on core HL7 FHIR technologies for healthcare interoperability, the Open Health Stack Player deployment toolkit, and AI Commons -- a model-agnostic healthcare AI initiative being co-developed with the World Health Organization.

A notable part of the announcement is its planned Implementer Program, which aims to give startups, small businesses, and local developers in low- and middle-income countries a formal role in governance. In other words, the effort is not just about building healthcare software standards, but about making sure the people implementing them in underserved markets help shape the project too.

Linux Foundation

[Himmy32]

Will moving the project under Linux Foundation governance accelerate adoption, or is this simply another foundation that most developers will never interact with?

Both will likely be true. Health care is a pretty niche sector and few non-sadists are going to develop HL7 adjacent applications by choice. That said lowering the effort to develop quality health care applications with supported Open libraries is a noble effort.

Working with the Linux Foundation which has a proven track record of focusing on establishing good vendor neutral governance is a solid play. Noting that the foundation has more than 1,000 projects, most of which are pretty small. So there are some

Re:

[Murdoch5]

I sincerely hope they uncouple Google, so I could run the applications on my OS of choice, be that Unix, Linux or Windows, without the need for an intermediate layer. What would be really cool, is if they could make it all run in encrypted enclaves to isolate all sensitive data, but I highly doubt that will happen.

In other news...

[Sethra]

Google hands off a project which can become a legal nightmare where AI exfiltrates user health records in order to absolve themselves of any liability while still pushing for their AI systems (and all their Big Tech buddies) to have access.

Re:

[Murdoch5]

Oh ya, this is going to likely become a privacy and security nightmare. I'm in Ontario, Canada, and we have some of the most pathetic and lacking security standards for privacy in general, but health care in particular.

But also "Who's going to do development"?

[HiThere]

Most FOSS software starts small, and easy to learn, and if it's going to grow, it grows with a community of developers that understand the software. This? Unless it's pretty small and compact, that's unlikely. And those who are going to develop using it probably need a company behind them. (Plausibly one with a good legal staff.)

Re:

[AmiMoJo]

It's more about getting health data into a common format so that it's not stuck in lots of individual providers. Your dentist, your health tracker, the place that did your x-ray, your smart bathroom scales, they can all contribute data to your health records. You can keep those records on the platform of your choice, including your own self hosted one.

And before the paranoid comments start, they did this with Matter for smart home stuff too, and it is genuinely open and local only capable.

Not convinced

[Uldis Segliņš]

Putting shit reputations on bread does not turn it all tasty.