What is Google’s role in this project?
Google leads the design and development of the open source components and design guidelines published as part of the Open Health Stack (OHS).
What is FHIR?
FHIR (Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources) is the latest version of the HL7 standard for building modern patient centered healthcare applications - see getting started with FHIR.
Why is Open Health Stack needed?
Open standards, such as FHIR, are gaining a lot of attention and have continued to show momentum with increased awareness and interest. For developers it can be challenging to adopt new standards into solutions, especially for those building for resource-constrained settings. Open Health Stack makes it easier for developers to leverage the FHIR standard, easing its adoption into digital health solutions. OHS components provide a rich set of features relevant to developers that simplify transitioning to FHIR. For example, the Android FHIR SDK provides bi-directional sync and storage to enable full offline capabilities for mobile app developers.
What kinds of use cases does Open Health Stack support?
OHS has been designed to address the needs of developers building digital health solutions for health workers who often operate in areas with poor connectivity. Solutions built using OHS components can support any kind of healthcare program and through our collaboration with the World Health Organization, OHS based solutions are able to run the WHO Smart Guidelines content that makes evidence based care easy to deploy. See our use cases and stories to see how developers are using OHS today.
Who is Google working with?
We're collaborating with the World Health Organization and a community of developers on Open Health Stack. To date developers from Ona, IPRD Solutions, IntelliSOFT Consulting, Argusoft, and a number of independent software engineers have contributed to the code-base. It is an open source initiative and we welcome contributions from developers who want to get involved. To get involved, take a look at the GitHub repositories for individual components, or reach out to us at hello-ohs@google.com.
Is Open Health Stack a managed service?
No. Open Health Stack provides a suite of building blocks that developers use to build and implement their own solutions. These can be deployed in local data-centers or on cloud providers.
What does Google do with the data?
Google does not receive, collect, store or process any data.