What is Better Digital Health Platform?

Composable architecture: Building flexible and future‑proof healthcare IT

Healthcare IT is undergoing a fundamental shift. For decades, hospitals and healthcare organisations relied on rigid, monolithic systems that attempted to do everything in a single application stack. While these systems centralised data and provided stability, they also created silos, locked organisations into a single vendor, and slowed innovation.

The Better Digital Health Platform enables a different way forward.

It is built on the principles of composable architecture, a modern approach that allows organisations to combine best‑of‑breed solutions and applications on a shared, open data layer.

Instead of replacing everything at once, this approach allows systems to evolve step by step, adapting quickly to new technologies, workflows, and models of care.

What is a Digital Health Platform?

A Digital Health Platform (DHP) is a new foundation for healthcare IT. Instead of relying on a single, monolithic electronic health record (EHR) system, a DHP provides a secure, standards-based layer for health data and services, enabling multiple applications, systems, and organisations to work together.

At its core, a Digital Health Platform:

• Separates data from applications so that data remains consistent, secure, and reusable across the ecosystem.
• Provides open APIs, microservices, and event-driven services that allow applications to connect, collaborate, and innovate.
• Implements open standards such as openEHR for clinical data and FHIR for operational and demographic data, along with terminologies like SNOMED CT.
• Supports modular growth, so healthcare organisations can add, replace, and evolve applications without locking themselves into one vendor.

This approach enables a flexible, future-proof, and vendor-neutral ecosystem, where multiple systems share a single source of truth for data and can adapt to new models of care as they emerge.

Composable architecture is the design principle behind this: it allows every component, from core data services to analytics dashboards, to be built, integrated, and extended as modules on top of the platform.

What is composable architecture?

Composable architecture is an IT design principle that structures complex systems as a set of smaller, self-contained modules. Each module focuses on doing one thing well, and all modules are connected through open standards and APIs.

In healthcare, composable architecture means:

• Applications are independent but interoperable, no more single-vendor lock-in.
• Data is stored in a vendor‑neutral repository, instead of being locked inside each application.
• APIs, microservices, and event-driven workflows connect everything, systems can communicate instantly.
• Components can be replaced or extended without disruption, new apps can be added without affecting the rest of the ecosystem.

Why composable architecture matters in healthcare

1. Agility: Add new functionality or update existing modules without re-implementing the entire EHR.
2. Best-of-breed innovation: Choose specialised applications for imaging, prescribing, analytics, or decision support.
3. Avoid vendor lock-in: Swap out components as better options emerge.
4. Interoperability: Ensure seamless data flow between systems using open standards.
5. Support for new care models: Adapt quickly to population health programmes, community-based care, and home monitoring.

The Digital Health Platform as the foundation

A Digital Health Platform (DHP) is the enabling layer that makes composable architecture possible. It separates data from applications, ensuring that data remains consistent, standardised, and secure no matter what applications are in use.

The DHP:

• Decouples data from applications.
• Provides APIs, microservices, and event streams for secure communication.
• Enforces open standards such as openEHR, FHIR, and SNOMED CT.

This allows healthcare organisations to assemble their IT ecosystem like building blocks – interoperable, reusable, and future-ready.

Key components of the Better Digital Health Platform

• Clinical data repository (CDR)
  Persistent, structured data built on openEHR, ensuring lifelong, vendor‑neutral clinical records.
• Operational data repository (ODR)
  Stores demographic and operational data using FHIR, enabling national registries, encounters, and scheduling.
• Terminology services
  Manages standardised vocabularies like SNOMED CT, LOINC, ICD, ensuring consistent meaning across all data.
• Microservices and APIs
  Allow systems to integrate and automate workflows without custom integrations.
• Event-driven services
  Notify other applications instantly when key data changes – for example, a new result or admission.
• Low-code development tools
  Enable IT teams and clinicians to rapidly build and adapt applications directly on top of the platform.
• Security and governance services
  Attribute-based access control (ABAC), auditing, and compliance are built in, ensuring data is accessed securely.
• Clinical portal
  Real-time access to patient information, applications, and workflows across multiple systems through a single, integrated view.

Composable architecture and the Postmodern EHR

The Postmodern EHR is built on composable principles:

• The core platform handles the data (CDR + ODR)
• Applications become modular, so user interfaces, analytics, and workflows evolve independently
• Clinicians enjoy better user experiences, while IT retains consistency, interoperability, and governance

Instead of being trapped by a single monolithic application, organisations can innovate continuously.

Benefits of the Better Digital Health Platform

How composable architecture changes application development

Instead of waiting for a single vendor to deliver features, organisations can:

• Combine data-driven insights with real-time operational workflows for better outcomes.
• Use low‑code tools to create applications quickly and deploy them into real clinical workflows.
• Integrate new technologies such as AI, telehealth, IoT devices on top of the existing data layer.