Stop building your own EHR: a CTO’s introduction to Medplum
As the CTO of a custom software boutique that assists clients in healthtech, I've observed many startups struggling with the complexities of building a compliant, interoperable healthcare solution. Today, I want to share a solution that can streamline your product development while adhering to healthcare requirements: Medplum.
What is Medplum?
Medplum is an open-source cloud platform that facilitates the rapid development of healthcare applications. It provides a headless EHR (Electronic Health Record) based on TypeScript and Node.js alongside a React component library for developers to build upon.
If you know what an EHR is, you're probably wondering how a resource-constrained startup would gain any speed at all building upon an EHR early on, as traditional EHRs are enormously complex software platforms. In any case, eventually, startups must face the conundrum of building vs. buying an EHR.
As Brendan Keeler said in the influential article To E(HR) or not to E(HR):
A third option has emerged in the industry to escape this dire build vs. buy dilemma: headless EHRs.
In a certain way, being a headless EHR, Medplum is akin to a Firebase for healthcare. Your developers build the UI and UX, while Medplum handles the data store, infrastructure, interoperability, and automation. But the Firebase analogy quickly breaks in a good way because even the UI/UX side is greatly simplified with Medplum since it provides pre-implemented, healthcare-focused React components built upon Mantine, one of developers' most appreciated UI libraries.
Why Medplum?
Comprehensive feature set
Medplum enables the creation of various healthtech products and features. Several open-source sample applications are available and well-documented, which helps as a scaffolding for developers to use as a basis for product MVPs and feature PoCs.
Medplum is designed as a complete full-stack application platform, not just a data store. It includes API endpoints for user authentication, account management, and automation capabilities. This comprehensive approach means developers can create a fully digital healthcare experience by writing only TypeScript code, with no additional servers beyond Medplum's own.
Unlike other FHIR servers that function more like databases, Medplum's well-integrated front end and back end lower the barrier to entry and reduce the maintenance burden for healthcare innovators.
Open-source advantages
The healthtech space has been severely constrained by proprietary technology and vendor lock-in. The lack of innovation, high cost, and implementation burden for healthtech solutions is not only caused by regulatory challenges but also by software seller concentration.
Medplum breaks the wheel by being open-source and fostering a thriving community. Your team can benefit from community-driven improvements, leverage solutions for problems others have already faced, and follow established patterns.
Many startups invest significant time and resources implementing custom in-house EHRs that often become legacy projects, struggling to keep up with industry regulations. These legacy systems also accumulate technical debt, as developers may be unaware of best practices for healthcare data modeling and workflows. Medplum provides an offbeat solution that's extendable for custom features, saving your team time and effort while ensuring adherence to standards.
Adherence to standards by design
FHIR (Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources) is a standard that defines how healthcare information shall be exchanged between systems. Due to US regulations, FHIR compatibility is mandatory for certain healthtech products. Medplum is FHIR-native, ensuring data interoperability, portability, and compliance from the start. This approach allows your developers to easily leverage integrations like Awell Health for workflows and implement SMART on FHIR for seamless integration with other EHRs.
Despite being a complex standard, FHIR isn't a burden for Medplum-powered codebases. Medplum's FHIR data structures are very well-typed with TypeScript so that developers can catch most structural errors in data at implementation time. When necessary, developers can use FHIR extensions to represent data that doesn't fall under the basic FHIR structures.
This built-in interoperability is essential in the modern healthcare landscape, where the ability to share and access data across different systems can significantly impact patient care and operational efficiency. By using Medplum, you are future-proofing your product and ensuring it can evolve with the ever-changing healthcare ecosystem.
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Simplified compliance
For healthtech startups, compliance is crucial for gaining early adopter confidence. However, dealing with compliance, security, and privacy complexities too early in development can drain resources when your startup should be focused on finding product-market fit. Medplum simplifies this process by offering out-of-the-box compliance, as you can check here.
Medplum also provides built-in audit capabilities and secure authentication, ensuring your product meets healthcare data protection standards from day one.
Ready-to-use components
Medplum offers a React component library based on Mantine, complete with a Storybook. This provides your developers with pre-implemented building blocks for healthcare solutions.
These components are unit-tested, so if your developers need to modify them, they can ensure the behavior is maintained after changes. The look and feel of these components can be configured without writing extensive custom code, allowing for quick customization to match your design goals.
Moreover, Medplum's comprehensive documentation enables developers to find answers and examples efficiently. When necessary, developers can examine its code, which has the top-notch quality and little accidental complexity, giving your developers a good reference on how to write long-lasting healthtech codebases with minimal technical debt.
As flexible as custom backends
As a headless EHR, Medplum offers flexibility compared to traditional backend APIs your developers would write from scratch. Developers can write custom backend code using serverless functions called Bots, similar to AWS Lambdas, for integrations, validations, workflows, and more. Writing fully-featured healthcare applications that adapt to new use cases is possible, evolving as your business grows.
Implementing custom logic without altering the core system ensures your product can maintain its unique value proposition while benefiting from Medplum's robust platform. Medplum infrastructure and components will also grow over time, so it makes sense to keep harvesting its benefits as they evolve. This balance of standardization and customization is critical for overcoming the trade-off between compliance and growth.
Managed Infrastructure
For early-stage products, Medplum's managed infrastructure is highly beneficial. It allows your team to focus on feature construction and delivery rather than all the toil work of infrastructure management. Medplum offers various pricing tiers for its fully managed cloud service.
For those who prefer self-hosting, Medplum provides open-sourced CDK scripts to set up its full stack. This flexibility ensures that as your product grows and your infrastructure needs evolve, you can take more control over your deployment while benefiting from Medplum's core features.
Successful products using Medplum
Medplum is powering healthtech startups like Summer Health, an innovator in direct-to-patient pediatrics. They use Medplum to support their nationwide practice, which is focused on patient engagement via SMS. Summer Health's growth demonstrates how Medplum can enable scaling while maintaining quality patient interactions.
Another example is Rad AI's Reporting application, which uses Medplum to save time and reduce burnout using AI, allowing clinicians to speak less and say more, having context-aware descriptions automatically filled. This showcases how Medplum can support advanced features like AI alongside real-time integrations in healthtech applications.
Your Healthtech Success, Accelerated by Vinta
While Medplum provides a solid foundation for your healthtech product, a powerful React and TypeScript platform as it works best with an expert team of developers. This is where Vinta can assist.
Vinta specializes in web development, MVP creation, and staff augmentation services. Our team of designers and software engineers can help companies develop Medplum-powered healthtech solutions.
For early-stage startups, we can streamline MVP development using technologies like Medplum. We also provide guidance for post-launch improvements based on user feedback and analytics, supporting your business as it grows in the healthtech market. Additionally, we can assist existing startups in migrating their legacy EHRs to Medplum, significantly increasing developer productivity and customer satisfaction.
By leveraging Medplum's platform and partnering with experienced developers like those at Vinta, you can accelerate your path to market while ensuring your product meets quality and compliance standards. Consider using Medplum to handle healthcare data management complexities, and let Vinta's expertise guide your product development.
