The SIH Alliance Wants to Build the Hospital Information System of Tomorrow
The SIH Alliance promotes the idea of separating data from the applications that use it, centralizing information in a single repository, and allowing each healthcare facility to design or integrate its own tools without creating technological dependency. This transformation is based on three complementary international standards (openEHR, FHIR, and OMOP-CDM), with the goal of fostering interoperability, digital sovereignty, efficiency, and medical innovation, particularly through AI.
Today, every French hospital juggles dozens, even hundreds of software tools. These systems, often proprietary and poorly interconnected, generate an ocean of data—nearly 97% of which is never exploited. This fragmentation of hospital information systems leads to security risks, high costs, preventable errors, and significant losses for both research and innovation.
“The successes we’ve seen abroad show that it’s possible to move away from piling up applications and instead build lean, efficient, data-centered systems,” says Dominique Pon, CEO of La Poste Santé & Autonomie, in the white paper “For Open, Sovereign and Data-Centered Hospital Information Systems” published by the SIH Alliance. This document outlines the current state of digital transformation in the hospital system before detailing the advantages and deployment methods of a data-centered IT architecture. It features examples of international initiatives, notably in the UK, Germany, the United States, and Catalonia.
A Single, Shared, Ethical, and Sovereign Repository to Organize Data
David Boussard, CEO of CPage, explains: “In a context of severe budgetary constraints affecting public hospitals, our model must combine cost control with the preservation of our capacity to innovate. Through this alliance, we promote co-development while optimizing our production costs…” This technological shift also pursues the goal of digital sovereignty. Since most players capable of offering such architecture are currently foreign, the creation of a French and European solution is key to maintaining control over health data.
To quickly deliver concrete solutions based on international standards, the SIH Alliance is relying on the expertise of Better, a European company that has successfully supported other countries and institutions in implementing data-centered systems, as well as on Maincare, a subsidiary of Docaposte.
The rollout of a Digital Health Platform, based on openEHR and FHIR standards and low-code development tools, is the first step in this transformation. It will serve as the foundation for gradually duplicating data from existing systems and hosting all future developments. The SIH Alliance plans a progressive migration toward this open architecture but expects quick, tangible outcomes: a modernized user interface, stronger coherence between modules, and unified data access. Initial use cases will be implemented by the end of the year in partner facilities. The expected benefits: improved care coordination, personalized medicine, streamlined hospital management, and faster research and innovation.
A Collective Effort Is Essential
The SIH Alliance is an open initiative serving the public interest. All stakeholders who share the Alliance’s values of sovereignty, openness, and ethics are invited to join, to help promote the emergence of an open, widely recognized and adopted standard. As Dominique Pon points out, this transformation will only succeed if it is collectively driven.
“We’ve planned meetings with public authorities such as the Digital Health Delegation and the Digital Health Agency,” he says. “The last two national digital health roadmaps laid the groundwork for infrastructure layers, especially for the INS (National Health Identifier) and MSSanté (secure messaging). There are also some broad guidelines around SIH architecture. We will therefore make our work available to public authorities to help speed up the standardization of the SIH architecture.”