Person-centred infrastructure for governed health data and AI collaboration
Vision
A future where health data, AI, services and expertise can work together around people and populations, across organisational boundaries, while participating organisations retain authority over the resources they hold and how those resources may be used.
Open Health aims to make this collaboration governed, accountable and reusable, enabling better care, stronger research and health innovation that no organisation could deliver alone.
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
“Our admission mechanism evaluates the conditions for participation before an operation takes place. A participant can contribute to one activity without automatically gaining broader rights, and the decision is recorded as auditable evidence."
— 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
“We are working towards a future where health innovation is organised around people rather than institutional boundaries. Organisations should be able to contribute data, expertise and capabilities without giving up control of them. Governed access, accountability and reusable standards are what can make that collaboration possible at scale.”
— Dr. Marzena Nieroda, UCL Global Business School for Health
Why do we need Open Health
Health innovation increasingly depends on data, models, services and expertise held across different organisations. The problem is not that these resources do not exist. It is that they are difficult to use together.
Islands of data and AI
Valuable data, models, services and expertise sit across independently governed organisations but are difficult to use together.
Centralisation does not solve authority
Moving resources into a shared environment does not remove questions about who may use them, for what purpose and under whose authority.
Connectivity is not governance
Federated technologies can connect data and computation. They do not by themselves establish whether a specific participant is entitled to perform a specific activity.
Services must evolve
Real services need to add organisations, resources and AI capabilities while preserving the authority, permissions and accountability established by the collaboration.
Open Health takes a different approach.
Open Health uses Federated Computing to coordinate interactions across independently governed organisations. Authority remains with the participating institutions, while agreed conditions determine who or what may act, on which resources, for what purpose and with what permissions. This makes distributed resources usable together without collapsing institutional authority into a common owner.
Find out more from our recent publications listed below.
The technology behind Open Health
Federated Computing provides the architecture for Open Health. Governance determines how participation within that architecture is authorised.
Rather than requiring sensitive resources to be brought into a single platform or organisation, Federated Computing enables partners to collaborate while retaining control of the resources they hold. Open Health applies this architecture through three complementary layers:
Federated learning
Learn across distributed data
Models can learn across datasets held by different organisations without requiring those records to be pooled.
Federated coordination
Use complementary resources together
Data, models, computation and services held by different organisations can be brought into relation for an agreed purpose.
Federated governance
Keep institutional authority binding
Participating institutions establish the conditions under which their resources may be used. Admission evaluates each requested interaction against those conditions before it proceeds and records the decision as evidence.
Together, these layers allow collaborations to evolve while institutional authority, permissions and accountability remain explicit across organisational boundaries.