Beyond the CMS: Drupal as the Backbone of an Open Health Platform

What happens when Drupal stops being “just the CMS” and becomes the governed backbone of a complex digital platform?
This session shares lessons from the Plataforma Oberta de Salut de Catalunya, where Drupal 11 is used as a headless backend for catalog management, APIs, taxonomy, governance and lifecycle orchestration of digital health assets. Instead of managing presentation, Drupal acts as a domain backend inside a wider ecosystem that connects React microfrontends, IAM for identity and roles, BPMN flows for homologation and approval workflows, Kafka for event-driven synchronization, clinical and citizen channels for product consumption, Backstage for supporting the digital assets development and OpenSearch/OpenTelemetry for observability and KPIs.
The project responds to a real functional challenge: health information is often fragmented across disconnected systems, making continuity of care, reuse of data and coordinated service delivery harder than they should be. The platform is conceived as an open, modular and interoperable public digital foundation to help institutions reduce that fragmentation, support more integrated and person-centered care, and make it easier to build, govern, homologate, publish and consume trusted digital health applications. In that sense, it is also a practical example of how public institutions can strengthen digital sovereignty by relying on open-source technologies, open standards and reusable platform capabilities instead of closed silos.