Case study: Voror Health Platform
State of Open: The UK in 2024
Phase Two “The Open Manifesto”
Sophie Don, Founder
Shane Tickell, CEO and Co-Founder
Open source based platform, ‘Voror Health Platform’, aims to bring together data from a wide range of sources within the healthcare system in real time and to normalise this in order to utilise that data for real time direct care, population health, research, and planning. The fundamental idea is to collect the data once in the healthcare system and for that data to be used multiple times for a variety of purposes.
The open source nature of the platform was pioneered initially in 2014 by former co-founder of Egton Medical Information System (EMIS), Dr David Stables, who funded much of this work in an attempt to tackle some of the complex and costly difficulties around accessing patient information. Voror Health continues to acknowledge the importance of engaging in open source technology within the healthcare sector, noting that using open source software is both economically beneficial and clinically saferdue to its collaborative nature. They boast that open source has the potential to enable capability, by allowing the use of vast amounts of real-time data. They also see such technology having a significant impact on patients and those who care for them, both medical professionals, carers, and family.
However, they note that there are still challenges involved in utilising open source software, in the healthcare system today. These particularly manifest around the NHS’s interest and understanding of the open source world and open source software. They argue that while some of the difficulties that they faced in the early years of the project have subsided, open source is still not receiving the attention it deserves. This has led to challenges in getting the attention of those who matter, to build their understanding of the enormous benefits of engaging in the open source community, and how that engagement might allow the expansion of the platform through contribution and collaboration as well as adoption, critical in a sector where funding is limited and stretched.
Despite these challenges, the Voror Health Platform has received engagement from other companies, who have used the technology and contributed to its open source codebase, but Voror Health are dreaming bigger. They want to expand the platform’s use further, across the whole of the UK, adding new capabilities to manage more and different types of data and allowing for connections with other systems. Doing so could have the impact of vastly improving the quality of patient data, ensuring greater patient safety through sharing these records when relevant, enabling access for research to a greater more comprehensive dataset and dramatically reducing industry costs.
Ultimately, Voror Health want to take their platform global, helping to implement it anywhere in the world to complement other systems and speed up crucial processes.
First published by OpenUK in 2024 as part of State of Open: The UK in 2024 Phase Two “The Open Manifesto”
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