What would you say if it already existed?
System-level orchestration, the whole governance estate, and a single community record that survives your next reorganisation — on openEHR record shapes, at a published price, with exit designed in. Well — now that’s possible.
What was asked forWhat it costsWhat would you say if it already existed?
A single digital health system that worked at system level — orchestrating flow, and turning it into insight you can act on while it still matters. That also carried the governance, in the same platform and off the same record: incident management, board meetings, information governance, the board assurance framework, regulatory compliance, mandatory training and qualifications, quality impact assessments, financial recovery programme management. And underneath it, a single community-based record that adapts when your structures change. On openEHR record shapes. With transparent, integrated pricing that does not lock you in.
Well — now that’s possible. It’s built.
The precedent for asking the question at all
At the Macworld Expo in San Francisco, Steve Jobs held up one device and described three: a phone, an iPod, and an internet communicator. The point was never the hardware. It was the observation that three things people already carried had no business being three things.
Health carries three
The record is one system. Flow and operations are another. Governance and assurance are a third, usually a folder of spreadsheets. Nobody chose that arrangement; it accumulated.
The programme never finishes
Every seam needs an interface, an assurance case, an infrastructure footprint and a team to keep it alive. The seams cost more than the systems they join.
People are the integration layer
The clearest sign a stack is wrong is the number of people employed to move data between its parts. No other real-time industry tolerates it, and health should not have to.
Twelve things, one platform
Not a suite with an integration layer between the products. One record, one jurisdiction profile, one audit trail, read by everything above it.
Orchestration
System-level flow orchestration
The health economy as one managed production line, with the binding constraint named and the cost of delay priced against the queue actually holding it — not a dashboard of the same numbers.
Real-time, actionable insight
Insight while it still matters, attached to the action it implies, rather than a report describing what happened three weeks ago.
Governance and assurance
Incident management
PSIRF-aligned, proportionate response, LFPSE reporting, and a duty of candour clock that starts itself.
Board meetings and papers
Agendas, packs, resolutions, voting and an action tracker, on a hash-chained decision trail a regulator can read.
Information governance
DSPT, DPIAs, the ICO breach clock, Caldicott, and the four statutory registers — FOI on the working-day clock, retention and disposal, the asset register with its Article 30 record, and data lineage.
Board assurance framework
Principal risks against strategic objectives, three lines of assurance, and gaps in assurance stated as gaps.
Regulatory compliance management
The regulator, inspection framework, background-check scheme and professional register resolved per jurisdiction — never hardcoded to one country's.
Mandatory training and qualifications
Statutory training, CPD, professional registration and background checks as one credentialling view, with expiry derived rather than typed.
Quality impact assessments
A gate enforced in software: a saving that has not been assessed for its effect on quality, safety, access and equity cannot be approved.
Financial recovery programme management
Targets, schemes, phasing and benefits that are validated with evidence — and cannot be signed off by the person who owns them.
The record, and the terms
A single community-based record
Primary care, community services, mental health, social care, pharmacy and dentistry in one record, that adapts when your structures change because organisation is a dated, evidenced model rather than a column.
Transparent pricing, no lock-in
Published prices, self-hosted in your own tenancy, open standards, and exit designed as a capability rather than written as a clause.
From an operator’s perspective, not a vendor’s
This matters more than any feature on the list above. A platform specified by people who have to live with the consequences starts from flow and governance, because that is what actually consumes a week. A platform specified to be sold starts from a feature list, because that is what wins a scoring matrix.
Martin Carpenter
Health CIO in a Crown Dependency health and care system and a non-executive director at an NHS foundation trust. Initiated the roughly $1.5bn acquisition of EMIS from an operating CIO seat at Optum UK.
FBCSFIoDCHCIO
Professor Marc Farr
Chief Data and Analytical Officer at East Kent Hospitals and NHS Kent and Medway. Founder of Beautiful Information, national chair of the Chief Data and Analytical Officers Network, and president of the Data Observatory.
HSJ 100 most influential, 2025
Hassan Chaudhury
Built the national digital health offer for Healthcare UK and the Department for Business and Trade, advising commercial teams across more than 90 countries. Co-founder, CIO and CCO of Health iQ through its 2019 exit.
Chair, National Council, Data ObservatoryCommercial Director, DATA-CAN; the Health Data Research UK Hub for CancerExpert in Residence, London Institute for Healthcare Engineering, King’s College London
Two of the three still hold operating seats inside health systems. That is the claim, and it is checkable.
The record is about to stop belonging to the organisation
Reported direction of travel: participation in a single patient record moves from voluntary to statutory. If that happens, the question a board asks its supplier changes — from can you build us a good record? to can our record become part of somebody else’s?
The easy half
A duty can compel you to expose data, in a stated format, within a stated time. That is a delivery problem: hard, expensive, and bounded.
The half nobody legislates
Whether the resulting record is usable turns on four things a statute cannot require: resolving which person, surviving reorganisation, attributing every element to its contributor, and establishing the access basis.
commvita is already the second
Built as one record across primary care, community, mental health, social care, pharmacy and dentistry — so it is an enabler rather than another contributor to be compelled. It is not a national record locator, and says so.
The legislative detail is reported to us and not verified here — every primary source is blocked from this build environment, and the explainer says so before it says anything else.
Transparent, integrated, and designed to be left
Pricing is published rather than quoted, the governance you need is included in the platform that holds the record rather than sold beside it, and leaving is a designed capability.
£1 per Commvita Flow Edition instance
One Commvita Flow Edition instance is one deployment for your organisation, with every environment included — production, test, training and disaster recovery. Not per seat, not per environment, not per site. With optional paid support. It is not free and we do not call it free. The Population Platform is priced per head and includes governance and assurance for the same scope — you are not charged twice for the thing this page is about.
One platform, not eight products
The governance reads the same record as the clinical work, which is why a risk drills down to the events that compose it and the counts reconcile. Eight products agreeing is a coincidence; one record agreeing with itself is a property.
Your data, and you stay because you want to
Self-hosted in your own tenancy, open standards throughout, and exit as a designed capability rather than a clause. A supplier who has to make leaving painful has already told you what it thinks of its own product.
The claims worth checking first
What “openEHR” means here, precisely
commvita is designed to openEHR’s record shapes and writes a composition to an EHRbase repository on consultation completion, and per-jurisdiction EHRbase containers ship with the platform. That is a real integration and it works against a real clinical data repository.
It is not a native openEHR implementation, and we do not describe it as one. commvita ships 0 archetype definitions, has no AQL query support, and the default repository target in a stock configuration is a mock. A platform that claimed “openEHR-native” on this basis would be overstating it, and a buyer would find out during implementation rather than during procurement.
The reason to say so on a marketing page is simple: the gap is discoverable in about ten minutes by anyone technical, and a claim that fails that test damages every other claim beside it.
Real-time means where the feeds are connected
The production line computes flow, work in progress, queue and the binding constraint from real operational state where the operational feeds are connected. Demand, returns and quality are representative until those feeds connect, and the platform says which it is showing rather than presenting both as live. A demonstration environment is seeded, and is labelled seeded.
The 80% is an ambition for total cost of ownership, worded that way on every commvita page including this one. commvita launches today, so nobody has banked it. What is not an ambition is the published price.
commvita is not a medical device. The platform presents recorded information and supports decisions; clinical decisions remain with the clinician.
The post
The launch copy, so the page and the post cannot say different things. Select it, or use the button.
3,062 characters. LinkedIn’s current limit for a feed post could not be verified from this build environment — linkedin.com is blocked by its egress policy — so check the length in the composer before posting rather than against a number we have written down here.