Skip to content

Community

You are not alone. There are more clinicians-who-code than there have ever been, and the number is growing. Find them.

This chapter is the practical follow-on to Sources of Help and Support. That page covers how to get unstuck on a specific technical problem; this one covers where to find your people.

Clinicians Who Code on Digital Health Networks

The Clinicians Who Code group on the Digital Health Networks platform is the main UK community for clinician-developers. It runs:

  • A discussion forum.
  • The annual CwC (un)Conference (more on which below).
  • Occasional regional meetups.

If you only join one community, join this one.

https://networks.digitalhealth.net/networks-content/clinicians-who-code

OpenHealthHub

OpenHealthHub is a community-run forum for open source healthcare software. It's smaller and more technical than the Digital Health Networks groups, with a focus on actual code rather than digital health discourse.

https://openhealthhub.org

Reddit

A few subreddits worth following:

  • r/medicine and r/medicaldevices for clinical context.
  • r/programming, r/learnprogramming for general developer discussion.
  • r/Python, r/rust, etc. for language-specific communities.
  • r/devops, r/selfhosted if you're running infrastructure.

Reddit is good for casual reading and for asking 'is this a good idea' questions. It's less good for getting code reviewed.

Discord and Slack

Most language and framework communities have an active Discord or Slack. Worth joining at least one for the language you use most:

Specific to UK clinical coding, there are several active Discord servers running, but they tend to be invite-only or community-curated. Ask in the Digital Health Networks CwC forum.

Bluesky

Twitter is a shadow of what it was for clinician-developers. Many of the people I followed there moved to Bluesky in 2023-2024. The clinical informatics community on Bluesky is small but active and friendly.

A starter list of useful follows is hard to maintain in a book. Look for the people who organise the CwC (un)Conference, contributors to NHS open source projects, and people who work on health interoperability.

Other forums and chat platforms

  • InteropOpen has historically run on various platforms. Check the current home.
  • FHIR Zulip — the global FHIR community: https://chat.fhir.org
  • openEHR Discourse — for openEHR practitioners: https://discourse.openehr.org
  • FCI (Faculty of Clinical Informatics) — the UK professional body for clinical informaticians.
  • RCGP HIG (Health Informatics Group) — for GP-side clinical informatics.

YouTube channels

A few worth subscribing to:

  • Everything Digital Health — UK-focused digital health content with sensible analysis.
  • Continuous Delivery — Dave Farley's channel. General software engineering, but everything he says applies to clinical software.
  • Fireship — fast, opinionated programming videos. Excellent for keeping up with what's new.
  • The Primeagen — Rust, Vim, and developer culture. Polarising but technically strong.

For language-specific content, search for tutorials on the specific topic; the channel matters less than the quality of the individual video.

Conferences

  • CwC (un)Conference — the Clinicians Who Code annual gathering in York. Smaller, friendlier, more practical than the corporate digital health events. Highly recommended.
  • HETT — large UK digital health show. Useful for industry context.
  • Rewired — the Digital Health flagship UK conference.
  • HIMSS Europe — large international digital health conference.
  • PyCon UK — for Python specifically.

For the cost-conscious, the CwC (un)Conference and PyCon UK are the best value.

How to contribute back to the community

When you've been at this a while, contribute back. Practical ways:

  • Answer questions in the forums. The question you find easy now was hard for you a year ago. Pay it forward.
  • Open source what you've built. Even small tools. Someone, somewhere, is solving the same problem.
  • Write up what you've learned. Blog posts, YouTube videos, conference talks. The act of writing forces you to understand the topic better.
  • Mentor. Find a clinician who's just starting and answer their questions. The best way to keep your own knowledge fresh.
  • Improve this handbook. It's open source. See Contribute.

The community is built by people who turn up. Be one of them.