The GitHub playbook healthcare won't touch, but should

Your workout app has better version control than your medical history. Why?

Developers can trace every change to a codebase back fifteen years. Every decision documented, every modification attributed, every rollback possible. Can you trace every decision made about your health? A lot of people can't even access their our own records without navigating a labyrinth of consent forms and departmental silos.

I have developed software for years, and I think GitHub remains one of the most elegant tools ever built for human collaboration. Its growth has been remarkable: from 30 million developers in 2018 to over 100 million by early 2023, and continuing to grow to over 150 million by 2025. With the explosion of vibe-coding tools, that trajectory shows no sign of slowing. But what fascinates me is not the technology itself. It is what GitHub proved about how humans can work together when the infrastructure supports them.

Healthcare today is like software development before version control: everyone working on their own copy, emailing attachments, praying nothing breaks.

That metaphor feels uncomfortably accurate. Before platforms like GitHub existed, developers exchanged code patches via email and FTP servers. Fragmentation was the norm. Sound familiar? It should. Healthcare still faxes medical records. Specialists offer conflicting advice with no shared repository to resolve the contradictions. Patients carry the cognitive burden of being their own version control system, often failing.

What if we imagined the human body as open source code? Not proprietary, locked behind institutional walls, but visible, forkable, collaboratively improved. This is not about exposing private information carelessly. It is about recognising that health journeys, when shared thoughtfully, become resources others can learn from. If GitHub proved that transparency accelerates progress, why does health data remain locked in institutional silos?

Consider what it would mean if your health data had a commit history showing every intervention and its outcome. A longitudinal timeline where every medication change, every lifestyle adjustment, every test result was documented with the reasoning behind it. You could see what worked, what failed, and why. New providers would not start from scratch. They would read your README file (your health onboarding document) and understand the full context before suggesting anything.

The parallels run deeper than storage. GitHub did not merely host code; it built community infrastructure. Issues, Actions, Discussions, Copilot. Most health and fitness apps remain siloed repositories; places where data goes to sit, not to connect. Where is the ecosystem thinking?

Picture fitness communities functioning like open-source contributor networks. Someone develops a protocol that works. Others fork it, adapt it to their bodies, report back. Stars and forks become social proof: ten thousand people tried this fasting method. Not anecdote, but aggregated, traceable experience. Patient-initiated treatment modifications become pull requests, submitted for clinical review rather than dismissed as non-compliance. Conflicting advice from specialists? That is a merge conflict, requiring structured resolution rather than leaving patients to reconcile contradictions alone.

What would a GitHub Copilot for clinicians look like ... and would patients trust it?

The question matters because medicine has historically feared iteration. Tech celebrates shipping to learn. Healthcare, understandably cautious with human lives, often delays until certainty arrives, which it rarely does. But there is middle ground. Automated health triggers already exist in limited forms: a glucose spike prompts an insulin adjustment. What if that thinking scaled? What if symptom logging included threaded discussion, like issue tracking, where context accumulated rather than disappeared between appointments?

The table below maps GitHub concepts to their potential healthcare translations. Not predictions, but provocations, ways of seeing differently.

|GitHub concept|Healthcare translation| |---|---| |Forking a repo|Adopting someone's successful health protocol and adapting it to your body| |Pull request|Patient-initiated treatment modification with clinical review| |Commit history|Longitudinal health timeline showing every intervention| |Merge conflicts|Conflicting advice from specialists that needs resolution| |Open source contributors|Community-driven health research (citizen science)| |GitHub Actions|Automated health triggers (glucose spike → insulin adjustment)| |README file|Your health onboarding document for any new provider| |Issue tracking|Symptom logging with threaded discussion| |GitHub Copilot|AI suggesting treatment paths based on similar patient patterns| |Stars and forks|Social proof on wellness protocols| What would it take to build this? Pause here. Think about your own health journey, or the journeys of those you serve. Where does information disappear? Where do patients carry burdens that infrastructure should carry instead?

GitHub's growth came from unwavering focus on developer experience. Healthcare remains focused on clinical outcomes and payer requirements, often at the expense of patient experience. The shift required is not technological, it is philosophical: treating patients as contributors, not just consumers of care.

For innovators and entrepreneurs, the first step is concrete. Map the developer journey of your target patient population. Document every friction point. Then ask: what would GitHub's product team do with this?

For healthcare executives, start smaller. Pick one internal process and implement version control thinking: every change documented, attributed, reversible. Begin with something low-stakes. Learn to ship to learn.

The tools exist. The models are proven. The question is whether healthcare will remain proprietary or finally go open source.

💥 May this inspire you to advance healthcare beyond its current state of excellence.