Archives of Disease in Childhood - RCPCH incubator: a new model for building open, sustainable digital health

marcus-baw
,
1

Hey, I published an academic paper!

https://doi.org/10.1136/archdischild-2025-329017

[!cite] Cite
Baw MJ, Dimitri P, Chapman S, et al. RCPCH incubator: a new model for building open, sustainable digital health. Archives of Disease in Childhood Published Online First: 28 October 2025. doi: 10.1136/archdischild-2025-329017

It’s about an alternative model of developing software for healthcare that sidesteps some of the problems caused by:

  • Development by governmental organisations (eg NHS England) - often the output is slow to materialise, technically outsourced, closed-source, and unresponsive to the needs of end users. (If they even agree it’s needed in the first place)

  • Development by for-profit system suppliers (eg EPRs) - again closed-source, proprietary development, but more problematically any feature developed only works for that EPR, which means you have to pay again and again for each supplier to develop the same feature.

It particularly suits development of small, constrained features which you want to be available ubiquitously to clinicians, across all systems. The ‘index case’ here is the RCPCH Digital Growth Charts, which is something that all paediatricians rely on for their work, yet it is a feature which is very inconsistently available in EPRs they use.

Central ‘Governmental’ development of a feature like this is often just not viewed as possible, indeed one can waste a lot of time trying to convince central organisations to agree a feature is necessary. Even if you do convince them, it’s going to be a long time before you get the feature.

Suppliers are often more ready to agree that a feature is needed, but the commercial incentives to add a feature like Growth Charts are often not strong enough to get them to develop the feature. And even if one supplier does, what do you do with the other couple of hundred suppliers? Do you pay them ALL to build the same feature? That’s just not financially sustainable.

Article links & PDF

archdischild-2025-329017.full.pdf (748.7 KB)

Open Access link (limited time only)

https://adc.bmj.com/content/archdischild/early/2025/10/27/archdischild-2025-329017.full.pdf?ijkey=6KwuyucXMMMoosz&keytype=ref

Normal link

https://adc.bmj.com/content/early/2025/10/27/archdischild-2025-329017

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