Digital Health’s New Plumbing: How Open Standards Are Fixing a Broken System

SAN FRANCISCO, CA – June 30, 2026 – The promise of modern medicine has long been tethered to the data we can collect about the human body. Yet, a fundamental disconnect has persisted at the heart of our digital health infrastructure: the chasm between the continuous, streaming data from wearable devices and the episodic, transactional world of clinical records. This is not a minor crack; it is a structural flaw that has stalled innovation, inflated costs, and kept the full potential of personalized medicine just out of reach. A new partnership, however, signals a crucial repair to this fraying system.

AnyBio, a biosignal infrastructure platform, and Medplum, an open-source clinical workflow provider, have announced a joint reference architecture that tackles this foundational problem head-on. By creating a seamless, standards-based integration, they are not just launching a product but are laying down a new set of rails for the entire digital health industry. This collaboration offers a forensic look at how specialized, composable systems can solve complex problems that monolithic platforms have historically failed to address.

The Developer's Dilemma: Bridging Two Worlds

For years, healthcare builders—from startups to established health systems—have faced an expensive and time-consuming dilemma. Integrating the torrent of data from a wrist-worn wearable into a clinician's workflow is, as the companies rightly identify, two fundamentally different engineering problems. Continuous biosignals, such as a patient's heart rate variability (HRV) or electrocardiogram (ECG), generate massive volumes of data at high velocity. This requires a streaming pipeline built for real-time ingestion, processing, and analysis. In contrast, clinical systems like Electronic Health Records (EHRs) are transactional databases, designed to manage discrete, episodic events like appointments, prescriptions, and lab results.

"Continuous biosignals and episodic clinical workflow are two different engineering problems," explained Stephen Saine, founder and CEO of AnyBio. "Every platform that tries to absorb both ends up doing one well and the other poorly, and the builder pays for the worse half." This reality has forced developers into a costly compromise, often spending 12 to 18 months and upwards of a million dollars to build a fragile, custom bridge between these two worlds. It's a process that diverts resources from clinical innovation to basic plumbing.

The AnyBio-Medplum integration elegantly solves this by dividing the labor. AnyBio acts as the specialized upstream pipeline, handling everything from Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) data ingestion from over 21 different signal types to real-time signal processing and the emission of standardized clinical observations. Medplum provides the downstream, FHIR-native foundation for the clinical application itself, offering pre-built components for patient portals, clinician dashboards, and care plans, all supported by a robust compliance and authentication stack. The result is a dramatic reduction in development time, from over a year to a matter of weeks.

FHIR as the Lingua Franca of Digital Health

The true ingenuity of this partnership lies in the seam connecting the two platforms: the Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources (FHIR) standard. Instead of a proprietary, black-box connection, the integration is built entirely on the FHIR Observation resource, a universal format for communicating clinical measurements. AnyBio natively generates these FHIR resources, complete with pre-mapped LOINC codes for semantic interoperability, and Medplum natively consumes them. There is no translation layer, no custom API, no data-lossy conversion.

"FHIR was designed for exactly this kind of composition," said Cody Ebberson, co-founder and CTO of Medplum. "An Observation written by AnyBio lands in a Medplum FHIR server cleanly, and from there standard FHIR-based workflows can take over." This adherence to open standards is a powerful blueprint for a more connected and efficient healthcare ecosystem. It dismantles the data silos that have long plagued the industry, preventing the vendor lock-in that stifles innovation. For years, the promise of wearable data has been trapped behind a wall of proprietary formats. This collaboration demonstrates a shift toward building a standard-gauge railway where before there were only disconnected, private tracks.

The technical depth of the integration reinforces its significance. The emitted FHIR resources are conformant with the latest US Core 6.1.0 implementation guide, ensuring they are immediately usable within the broader American healthcare system. Furthermore, AnyBio includes Provenance resources, creating an auditable chain-of-custody that traces every derived metric back to its raw source signal—a critical feature for clinical-grade data that must survive IT and regulatory scrutiny.

From Data Streams to Clinical Action

Ultimately, the integrity of our health systems is measured by their impact on patient care. This new infrastructure moves beyond theoretical interoperability to enable tangible, real-world applications. By closing the gap between raw biosignals and actionable clinical information, the joint architecture unlocks the potential for sophisticated remote patient monitoring (RPM) and proactive chronic disease management programs.

A clinician can now design a care plan in Medplum that automatically triggers when a patient's SpO2 levels, streamed via AnyBio from a wearable, fall below a certain threshold. The reference architecture demonstrates how to build programs that can scale from a five-person pilot to monitoring hundreds of patients, delivering patient-facing nudges through a web portal or mobile app. This transforms the relationship between citizen and provider from one of periodic check-ins to one of continuous, data-driven engagement.

The platform supports a wide array of signals—including HR, HRV, ECG, SpO2, Electrodermal Activity (EDA), and blood pressure—making it a versatile foundation for programs in cardiology, respiratory care, mental health, and beyond. It effectively transforms raw, noisy data into a clean, clinical-grade artifact within the EHR, ready for a physician's review. This is the crucial last mile that has been missing from so many digital health initiatives.

The Bedrock of Trust: Compliance and Security

As we integrate ever-more-intimate data streams into the machinery of the state and the healthcare system, the questions of governance and trust become paramount. A data pipeline is only as strong as its security and compliance framework. Building this from scratch is another significant hurdle that stalls innovation. Here again, the layered approach provides a robust solution.

Both platforms operate on HIPAA-compliant infrastructure and provide Business Associate Agreements (BAAs) for their production tiers, a non-negotiable requirement for handling protected health information in the U.S. AnyBio has gone further, achieving SOC 2 Type I certification with Type II in observation and aligning with GDPR, ensuring the architecture is viable for global deployment. By providing these compliance and security guarantees as part of the core infrastructure, the partnership allows builders to focus on clinical efficacy and user experience, confident that the foundation is secure. This is the essential, often invisible, work that ensures physician-led programs can survive internal review and actually be deployed to help patients, strengthening the systems that hold our public health together.