Federated computing platform for collaborative global health innovation and societal impact
Vision
Open Health empowers global health partnerships to deliver person-centred, privacy-first insights that drive precision medicine, personalised care, services, and innovation—through a secure, federated digital ecosystem.
Professor Pete Williams
Professor, Research Lead, Centre for Eye Research Australia
“Open Health is like oil in an engine—it doesn’t drive outcomes, it enables them. By connecting data, people, and systems across sectors, it powers collaboration and unlocks insights we didn’t even know we were missing.”
— Professor Pete Williams, Centre for Eye Research Australia
“Open Health turns privacy and data sovereignty into strategic strengths. By keeping each dataset within its legal jurisdiction and under its owner’s control, our federated approach enables secure, real-time collaboration across healthcare and related sectors without compromising trust, ownership, or compliance."
— Enzo Fenoglio, AI and Machine Learning Expert
Enzo Fenoglio
AI Researcher and Honorary Senior Research Associate at UCL
Dr. Marzena Nieroda
Associate Professor, Translational Leadership UCL
“Open Health uses market research principles to keep innovation grounded in real-world needs—enabling stakeholders to co-create person-centred tools that are inclusive, practical, and built for impact.”
— Dr. Marzena Nieroda, UCL Global Business School for Health
About Open Health
Open Health is an open, scalable technology framework that enables universities, public bodies, and commercial organisations to collaborate on health insights nationally and globally—without sharing raw data and without reliance on closed or proprietary platforms.
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Inspired by Open Banking, Open Health enables secure, multi-stakeholder collaboration across distributed datasets by moving computation to where data resides.
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At its core, Open Health combines:
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Federated Learning (FL) for decentralised AI model training,
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Federated Computing (FC) for distributed analytics, inference, data processing, and services across organizations, supported by interoperable APIs while data remains local.
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Federated Computing as Code (FCaC) for turning governance and access rules into verifiable execution controls across organizational boundaries.
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Open Health combines three complementary layers: Federated Learning for training AI models without moving raw data, Federated Computing for running analytics and other computations across organizations while data stays local, and Federated Computing as Code for turning governance and access rules into verifiable controls across organizational boundaries.
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This clear separation enables Open Health to scale across institutions and jurisdictions while remaining transparent, governable, and adaptable.
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Anchored in health systems, patient, and user needs, Open Health enables the creation of new interdisciplinary knowledge by connecting medical, genomic, social, environmental, and economic insights that cannot be generated in isolation. It enables AI-powered solutions for population health, prevention, and precision medicine and wider system decision-making.
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Why do we need Open Health?
The Challenge​
Health systems depend on insights from clinical, genomic, population, and environmental data. Yet this data is fragmented across organisations and governed by complex legal, ethical, and commercial constraints. Centralising it is often risky or impossible—leaving many high-value, cross-institutional analyses out of reach.
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What does not work
Most existing solutions are either single-organisation tools, closed proprietary platforms, or experimental technologies that are difficult to deploy in real health systems. While federated learning enables decentralised computation, it rarely addresses governance, usability, and institutional trust—especially in regulated clinical and genomic settings.
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The Open Health approach
Open Health is a translational, open, and scalable platform designed for real-world adoption. It enables secure, multi-partner collaboration without sharing raw data, while preserving local control, regulatory compliance, and transparency. Rather than introducing unusable technology, Open Health builds on proven federated approaches and adds the orchestration and governance needed to operate in practice.
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​​Designed to scale and support person centric health
Open Health is built to scale across organisations, sectors, and jurisdictions—supporting collaboration at national and global levels and enabling insights that no single institution could generate alone
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