GP, Clinical Informatician, and freelance Software Developer working primarily at the Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health in London. Based in Yorkshire, UK.
I believe open source is an ethical imperative in medicine. Healthcare software affects people's lives directly - it should be transparent, auditable, and built in the open. Not as a nice-to-have, but as a fundamental requirement.
I make videos about NHS technology and digital health reform on Everything Digital Health.
I'm an "NHS General Hacktitioner" - combining clinical work with building digital health infrastructure that actually works for clinicians and patients. I write code in Python, Ruby, JavaScript, and Rust, and spend a lot of time thinking about how we can make NHS technology better by building it openly. Deploying to the 'unique' NHS environment is a challenge, but it's one worth solving.
RCPCH Digital Growth Charts - Open source growth charts for children, deployed nationally across the UK and internationally.
sct - A local-first SNOMED CT toolchain that builds portable terminology artefacts from licensed RF2 releases.
gitehr - A database-free, patient-centric electronic health record designed without organisation-centricity or legacy constraints.
clincalc - A fast, reliable, LLM-friendly clinical calculator CLI.
nhsnumber - Tools for working with and validating NHS numbers.
dsc - A CLI for managing Discourse instances over SSH or the REST API.
greenbook - A computable Green Book prototype for vaccination and immunisation.
clip-to-discourse - Tools for bringing useful material into Discourse communities.
awesome-missing-nhs-things - A curated list of digital infrastructure, interfaces, and data sources that the NHS needs but does not have yet.
Also: oct, an alternative approach to open clinical terminology.
I run Open Health Hub, a community forum for open, honest discussion about health tech.
I'm a founder of the Clinical Digital Manifesto, a set of principles for how digital health infrastructure in the NHS should be built: open source, clinician involvement, and patient-centred design as non-negotiable requirements.
I'm active in the Discourse community - I self-host forums and contribute to Discourse Meta.
- 📺 YouTube: Everything Digital Health
- 🌐 Website: bawmedical.co.uk
- 🦋 Bluesky: @marcusbaw.com
- 💬 Discourse Meta: @pacharanero
If you're working on open health tech or trying to make NHS digital infrastructure better, get in touch.