Today we're announcing the intention to launch the Open Health Stack Software Foundation (OHS-SF) — an independent, community-owned foundation hosted by the Linux Foundation. Our mission is to provide the open-source building blocks for AI-powered, next-gen digital health solutions, to catalyze sustainable local innovation, and to help close health equity gaps — making it dramatically easier for developers everywhere to build, deploy and own standards-based digital health applications. Read the official announcement from the Linux Foundation.

Open Health Stack began as a Google project in 2023, developed in close collaboration with the World Health Organization, and has grown into an active ecosystem of developers and implementers across Sub-Saharan Africa, South Asia and Southeast Asia. Moving to the Linux Foundation establishes vendor-neutral stewardship — ensuring these building blocks belong to the community that depends on them.

The foundation's direction is aligned with the WHO's Digital Health Strategy 2020–2030 and the “Full-STAC remedy” approach — a shared vision, co-authored with a community of partners, to accelerate next-generation, person-centered digital health. Its approach is sovereign by design: locally-owned solutions, at national scale, built on shared open foundations.

What we're buildingThree pillars, one mission

The OHS-SF organizes its work into three pillars — each a different way to engage, all grounded in open standards for health and AI.

Pillar 01 · Active

FHIR Foundations

The standards-based bedrock — core libraries, SDKs and components that make it easier to build with HL7® FHIR®. If you're building anything that touches health data, this is where you start.

Pillar 02 · Active

Reference Toolkit

Build and deploy faster across platforms. A community-driven, multiplatform (Android, iOS, Web) toolkit for standards-based, localized solutions — AI-ready and extensible by design.

Pillar 03 · Launching

AI Commons

A neutral, model-agnostic space for enabling safe, effective and Verifiable AI in global health — co-developed with the World Health Organization.

Teams can build through the Reference Toolkit or directly on any pillar — always grounded in the open standard underneath.

Why the Linux FoundationBuilt for neutrality, sustainability and scale

Open-source projects need more than good code — they need neutral governance, continuity and a level playing field. As the host of projects like the Linux kernel, Kubernetes and RISC-V, the Linux Foundation provides exactly that. For OHS-SF, it means:

  • Neutral, open governance. Decisions are made transparently by those doing the work — no single entity can capture the commons.
  • Sustainable, diverse funding. Tiered memberships and grants remove single points of failure in both funding and code ownership.
  • Capacity building. Global reach for workshops, bootcamps and regional convenings that build local engineering capacity.
  • Equity by design. An Implementer Program lets small companies and pre-revenue startups in low- and middle-income countries take part without fee barriers — and contributing never requires membership.

The communityBuilt with — not just for — the community

The foundation builds on years of collaboration and real-world deployment. Anchor partners include Google, the World Health Organization, Endless Health and Anthropic; advisors include the World Bank Group and UNICEF; and active implementers such as Ona, IntelliSOFT, Nawi Tech, Living Goods and Kushi Baby are already building in the field — with a growing network across multiple continents.

The building blocks are ready. The community is here.

Join us and help build what comes next — together!