About OHTF¶
The Open Health Technology Foundation (OHTF) is a UK-based, internationally minded steward for open-source health technology.
Health care depends on open-source software: libraries that validate NHS Numbers, SNOMED CT tooling, clinical calculators, immunisation schedules, health record systems and clinical safety documentation. Too often these are rewritten from scratch in every product, or live in one person's GitHub account until that person changes job. OHTF gives them a durable, neutral home that can hold assets, support maintainers, publish code openly and offer paid services, without turning shared infrastructure into a proprietary product.
What OHTF does¶
- Accepts and stewards open-source health technology projects that have named maintainers and a clear public benefit.
- Provides organisation-level governance, contribution terms, security reporting and project lifecycle practices.
- Holds project assets, including domains and trademarks, where that protects a project's neutrality and continuity.
- Publishes source code, build and deployment configuration, tests and documentation under open licences.
- Offers paid hosting, support, implementation and training, without restricting anyone's rights in Foundation Projects.
- Helps preserve useful public-benefit health software when its original organisational home can no longer look after it.
What OHTF is not¶
- Not a standards body. HL7, SNOMED International and openEHR write specifications. OHTF looks after code that implements them.
- Not a product vendor. OHTF does not sell an electronic patient record or a closed platform.
- Not a professional body. Clinical and informatics professional bodies set professional standards. OHTF works alongside them.
- Not a substitute for clinical safety work. A licence, a repository or a CIC does not make software safe. Clinical safety depends on the product and how it is deployed, and OHTF projects document that honestly.
Operating principles¶
- Open by default
- Foundation Project code, build and deployment configuration, tests and documentation stay open for anyone to use, change and share. See the open-source commitment.
- Public benefit, paid for by practical services
- OHTF can charge for hosting, support, implementation and training. That income sustains the shared infrastructure; it never encloses it.
- Clear stewardship
- Every project has named maintainers, a contribution path, a security contact and an explicit lifecycle status.
- Clinical safety is part of engineering
- Safety evidence lives close to the code, in the same repository, issues and releases.
- Reproducible operations
- Infrastructure is described in version-controlled code, with a realistic self-hosting path where appropriate. Nothing depends on knowledge held by one person or one vendor's console.
- Working code over committees
- Working software and maintainable operations beat committees and strategy documents.
Legal form¶
OHTF is Open Health Technology CIC, a UK community interest company limited by guarantee, company number 17544421. A change of name to Open Health Technology Foundation CIC is in progress. A CIC has a statutory asset lock, can hold intellectual property and trademarks, can contract and employ people, and must operate for community benefit. OHTF's Articles of Association also entrench an open-source commitment for Foundation Projects.
Its code and Foundation Projects live in the open at github.com/ohtf. See governance and transparency for details.
Origins¶
OHTF grew out of practical experience. The nhs-number library was previously moved to the uk-fci GitHub organisation, associated with the Faculty of Clinical Informatics (FCI). When the Faculty closed, that home stopped being viable, and the name could not be reused. It now lives at github.com/ohtf/nhs-number-py. At the same time, contributors to open-source clinical libraries kept running into the same question from their employers: whose code is this, and what happens if something goes wrong? A named, neutral, community-owned organisation is a better answer to both problems than a collection of personal repositories.