An open project, and the idea behind it.

Healthcare gets cheaper when designs are shared and more expensive when they are owned. Almost every part of the system runs the other way: the device, the protocol, the software, and the supply chain are each somebody’s moat, and the cost of that arrangement lands on patients.

The idea worth testing is what happens if you invert it — care where every non-clinical asset is open. Device designs, clinical protocols, software, manufacturing processes. Anyone could contribute, and anyone could donate work into the commons one way: free for people inside the network to use, and free for competitors to use too. Funded by membership rather than by owning the intellectual property.

The version of that worth wanting is Costco-scale: high quality, thin margins, improving every year for the people who join, and eventually reaching everyone. That is a direction, not a roadmap.

None of that exists. Saying so plainly matters more than sounding further along than we are — a project about not overstating what it knows should not overstate what it is.

What exists is this registry, and it was built first for a reason. We could not answer a basic question at the start: what has already been built? People have been making open medical hardware, open protocols, and open clinical software for two decades, largely without a shared index. Duplicated effort everywhere. Excellent projects that go dormant unnoticed. Before anyone builds anything new, that map should exist.

So the map is the contribution, and it is openly licensed — including for anyone who wants to build the same idea and do it better. It is useful whether or not anything else here ever happens.