In a July 20th Nature Commentary, John Wilbanks, Chief Commons Officer at Sage Bionetworks and Eric Topol, MD, Director of the Scripps Translational Science Institute, and Chief Academic Officer of Scripps Health describe a set of governing principles for digital health data analysis that are designed to maximize the contribution of large-scale digital data to advancing medical care. The two work together on the NIH-funded PMI, which focuses on large-scale efforts for data management and interoperability – a problem that has been solved across many in other fields but remains an issue within the health space.