News

Linux Foundation to Launch Open Health Stack Software Foundation, With Google Handing Over Code and Assets

• By John K. Waters
• 07/14/2026

The Linux Foundation said on July 9 that it intends to launch the Open Health Stack Software Foundation, a new vendor-neutral, community-governed organization to house the open-source software tools developers use to build AI-enabled digital health applications, according to a press release from the Linux Foundation.

The foundation, known as OHS-SF, is intended to address fragmentation in digital health infrastructure that the Linux Foundation says creates barriers to interoperability and limits the adoption of emerging technology across health systems, particularly in resource-constrained regions.

"Open source has already transformed enterprise software, cloud computing, and AI, and it will do the same for how the world delivers care," Linux Foundation Chief Executive Jim Zemlin said in the release. He added that the foundation "brings together the global community of developers, health organizations, and implementers under a vendor-neutral, community-governed home, ensuring that the tools powering tomorrow's AI-enabled health systems are built in the open, for everyone."

Google is contributing the code and underlying assets of Open Health Stack, the project it launched with the World Health Organization in 2023 to help developers build digital health tools aligned with WHO clinical and public health guidance, according to a statement published on the Google blog. Google.org is providing a three-million-dollar grant to support the foundation's long-term growth, per the same statement.

"We built Open Health Stack because we wanted to put the developers and community health care workers serving people on the edges of care back at the center of development and give them access to world-class tools for building next-gen digital health solutions," said Kat Chou, vice president at Google Research, according to Healthcare IT News.

Google said Open Health Stack has, over roughly three years, supported deployments across Sub-Saharan Africa, South Asia and Southeast Asia through technical partners including Argusoft, Ona, IntelliSOFT and Living Goods, according to the Google blog post.

The World Health Organization said it will contribute to the foundation to help keep its work aligned with WHO norms, standards and country needs, according to a statement published by the WHO. The organization said the effort builds on a collaboration that began in 2020, when it identified the need to make its SMART Guidelines and other clinical and public health standards usable inside real digital health systems rather than published only as documents.

Dr. Michael Howell, chief health officer at Google, said in the WHO statement that Open Health Stack represents "open, transparent, and verifiable infrastructure that helps build truly trustworthy AI in health," and that contributing it to the Linux Foundation ensures developers can build tools that clinicians and public health professionals can rely on based on shared standards.

The foundation's technical work is anchored in HL7 FHIR, the interoperability standard used for exchanging health data, along with international terminologies such as the International Classification of Diseases, so that clinical information recorded in one system carries the same meaning in another, according to the WHO statement. Membership is free for nonprofit, academic, and government entities under the Linux Foundation's associate membership tier, per the same statement.

The Linux Foundation said the foundation will be organized around three primary technical areas: native support for FHIR-based health data standards, a reference toolkit called the Open Health Stack Player designed for offline-first deployments in local clinics, and AI Commons, described as a neutral, model-agnostic space for validating and benchmarking AI applications in global health, co-developed with the World Health Organization, according to Healthcare IT News.

To lower barriers for smaller organizations, OHS-SF is introducing an implementer program that allows local software firms, small businesses, and pre-revenue startups in low- and middle-income countries to participate in governance without financial barriers, according to the Linux Foundation release.

Organizations that expressed initial support for the foundation include Google, Microsoft, Anthropic, the World Health Organization, the Asia eHealth Information Network, the Center for Global Digital Health Innovation at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, the Clinton Health Access Initiative, PATH, Medtronic Labs and several regional implementation partners, with advisory support from UNICEF, according to the Linux Foundation release.

Smisha Agarwal, director of the Center for Global Digital Health Innovation at Johns Hopkins, said in a statement accompanying the announcement that standards-based, modular architecture allows countries to operate their digital health infrastructure without depending on external systems they cannot adapt or maintain, and that this reduces the risk of failed implementations while opening the door to local private sector participation, according to Healthcare IT News.

OHS-SF is open for participation, with project repositories available on GitHub, according to the Linux Foundation release.