Heidelberg · team since 2016 · GmbH since 2018
digital health
craftsmanship.
We conceive, build and run digital health solutions for hospitals and healthcare providers — interoperable, regulatory-grade and proven in production. Since 2016, with a team that has worked on nothing else.
10 yrs
of patient portals and patient engagement — as a team at Heidelberg University Hospital since 2016, as phellow seven GmbH since 2018
2 countries
projects in German university hospitals and the Swiss electronic patient record (EPR)
12 projects
shipped as products, funded research and open source — several of them passed formal interoperability assessments
Expertise
Seven disciplines in one team — because digital health projects rarely fail on technology, they fail at the interfaces between them.
Interoperability Hospital information systems, subsystems, medical devices and data sources integrated on established standards — for networked care instead of point solutions. HL7 FHIRIHEDICOMopenEHR Privacy, Security & Regulatory Privacy and security by design across the whole product lifecycle — GDPR, MDR, AI Act and Cyber Resilience Act built into the process, not into audit preparation. GDPRMDRAI ActCRAISO 27001 User-centred Design Built from the perspective of patients, nursing and medical staff — usable per IEC 62366, accepted in clinical routine. IEC 62366Usability studies Cloud Engineering Cloud-native architectures — GDPR-compliant, highly available and scalable, operated in certified EU data centres. Cloud-nativeMicroservicesCertified data centres Rapid Application Development From concept to deployable product — in short iterations, with early clinical feedback and no shortcuts on quality or documentation. MVPPrototypingAgile Requirements & Workflow Engineering Clinical and administrative workflows analysed, requirements structured, processes modelled — so software fits the care routine, not the other way round. BPMNRequirements engineering Digital Health Transformation Digital strategy, implementation and change management — one point of contact from first idea to routine operation. StrategyImplementationChange management
All disciplines in detail How we work
Four phases, one point of contact: from analysis to operation under one roof.
1
Analyse
Taking stock of processes, system landscape and data flows — we first understand where you stand and where the biggest leverage is.
2
Conceive
Requirements, clinical workflows, data-protection and security concept — worked out with clinical departments, IT and patients.
3
Build
Native apps, web frontends and interfaces — built and tested against your real system landscape in short iterations.
4
Run
Operation, support, security patches and further development — reliably, well beyond go-live.
Digital sovereignty
Digital sovereignty is not a feature — it is an architectural principle. Your systems must outlive every vendor, including us.
SOV-3 · DATA SOVEREIGNTY
Your data, your keys
You decide where patient data lives — in your own network, on the patient's device or in a cloud of your choosing. The keys always stay with you, and processing stays within the EU.
SOV-4 · OPERATIONAL SOVEREIGNTY
Run it without us
Documentation, source code and operational know-how sit with you — whether you run the system yourself or ask us to. Built and supported from Heidelberg, with clear exit and migration paths should you ever need them.
SOV-6 · TECHNOLOGY SOVEREIGNTY
Open standards, open source
Wherever possible we build on trusted standards that keep your systems connectable. Existing interfaces are integrated just the same. phellow community is developed as open source: auditable, adaptable, reusable.
SOV-7 · SECURITY & COMPLIANCE
Compliance under EU law
GDPR by design, ISO 27001-trained engineers and security patches from a single source. We are glad to support independent audits — with full visibility.
Open source
phellow.community
An open-source frontend for patient portals. Developed in the open, free of licence fees, on the same technical foundation as our production systems — so digital sovereignty is more than a promise.
- Auditable
- Source code in public — for your own audits, security reviews and adaptations.
- Standards-based
- HL7 FHIR and IHE — connectable to existing HIS and portal backends.
- Reusable
- A foundation for your own patient portal — with or without us.
From the workshop
Ten years of project work in healthcare — shipped as products, publicly funded research or open source. All of it on the same proven technical foundation.
All projects since 2016
Standards, regulation, operations — where is your project stuck?
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