About Local First Health.
Local First Health is an early-stage initiative. Our mission is to help more local-first health apps get built: apps that keep useful records on people’s devices, support essential work offline and let people take their records with them.
Our mark
Seven pins stand for the seven local-first ideals. They also suggest a network of local peers: each able to keep a useful copy, with ways to exchange records when a suitable connection is available.
The circle holds those peers together. It represents local independence and the wider world a clinic can connect to, including optional cloud services. Privacy and control are goals behind the mark; they depend on how each app is built.
Working offline does not mean being cut off. Exchange between devices or systems, including over a local network without internet, needs compatible software and separate design and testing.
Why this matters
To equip people to keep their health information connected, so that every visit builds on the last.
Our manifesto sets out what we believe people should be able to keep, use and share. Our proposed principles describe what software built toward that belief should do.
Where our perspective comes from
LFH grew out of our experience working in teams building health record systems since 2016. That work exposed practical problems with unreliable connections, records that were difficult to move, and keeping information useful when software changes.
In 2016, we built an offline approach for a client with an intermittent connection. That work taught us both the value of offline access and the need to understand its limits.
Visits to doctors, small clinics and community drugstores in the Philippines, Indonesia, Ethiopia, Kenya, South Africa, India and Sri Lanka raised further questions about connectivity, record access and maintenance.
The founder found further inspiration after attending the first Local-first Conf in Berlin in 2024.
We believe local-first software is a major part of the answer. We want the ideas to reflect the experience of people who do the work.
LFH is led by its founding team.
Get in touch
LFH develops as time allows. If you'd like to share a question or perspective, start a conversation.