In 2021, The Linux Foundation Became a Trusted Resource for Public Health and Industry Partners‭, and OpenTreatments Tackled Rare Diseases‬

Linux Foundation Public Health is Still Making Strides in 2021

Linux Foundation Public Health (LFPH) hosts, supports and nurtures open source technology to benefit public health initiatives.

Since its founding a little over a year ago, the organization has become a go-to resource for governments and industry partners to get advice on the latest technologies coming to market. Over 50 jurisdictions worldwide have come to trust LFPH for unbiased, clear guidance on how to take advantage of technologies within our program areas of exposure notification and COVID credentials. National and global institutions such as the WHO, CDC, UN, and GAO have also invited LFPH to present at meetings, contribute to reports, and assist them in their own understanding of this technology.

Meanwhile, LFPH projects and initiatives continue to grow. The Global COVID Certificate Network and standard developments happening at the COVID-19 Credentials Initiative are becoming some of the leading groups solving the challenges of interoperability between divergent systems and standards emerging around the world. The organization’s leadership role in the Good Health Pass Collaborative has established LFPH’s voice as one of the leads in the ethical, privacy-first design of public health software. With the addition of Herald, Cardea, and MedCreds, the foundation’s projects are now used in over a dozen states, provinces, and countries worldwide to help fight COVID-19 and safely reopen borders. 

While COVID is not going anywhere, LFPH is charting a path forward beyond pandemic response. The pandemic has highlighted the need to overhaul public health infrastructure worldwide to create better ways to share data within and across borders. Open source software will be a crucial piece of solving that puzzle worldwide.

OpenTreatments‭ ‬&‭ ‬Rarecamp: Addressing Rare Diseases

In March of 2021, the Linux Foundation announced that it would be hosting RareCamp and the OpenTreatments Foundation. RareCamp enables treatments for rare genetic diseases regardless of rarity and geography.

Four hundred million patients worldwide are affected by more than 7,000 rare diseases, yet treatments for rare genetic disorders are underserved. More than 95 percent of rare diseases do not have an approved treatment, and new treatments are estimated to cost more than $1 billion.

The RareCamp open source project provides open governance for the software and scientific community to collaborate and create the software tools to aid in creating treatments for rare diseases. The community includes software engineers, UX designers, content writers, and scientists who are collaborating now to build the software that will power the OpenTreatments platform. The project uses the open source Javascript framework NextJS for frontend and the Amazon Web Services (AWS) Serverless stack – including AWS Lambda, Amazon API Gateway, and Amazon DynamoDB – to power the backend. The project uses the open source toolchain Serverless Framework to develop and deploy the software and is licensed under Apache 2.0 and available for anyone to use.

The project is supported by individual contributors and collaborations from companies that include Baylor College of Medicine, Castle IRB, Charles River, Columbus Children’s Foundation, GlobalGenes, Odylia Therapeutics, RARE-X, and Turing.com.

These efforts are made possible by the dozens of enterprises that support the LFPH and OpenTreatments foundations.

To learn how your organization can get involved with LFPH, click here

To learn how your organization can get involved with OpenTreatments, click here