Medplum: fast-tracking healthcare solutions for simplified EHR building
Developing software is no easy business, but EHR (Electronic Health Record) development packs a few extra layers of complexity. In addition to meeting industry-specific requirements and compliance, EHRs must integrate seamlessly into existing healthcare professionals' work procedures without introducing excessive complexity to their routines. This becomes even more evident when clinicians point to bad EHRs as a significant driver of increased workload and burnout.
This scenario reveals a pivotal need: healthcare technology must be innovative and easy to adopt. Medplum is here to bridge that gap. It provides a clean, secure, and compliant platform as a foundation for healthcare applications. By clearing the path for developers to build within the healthcare ecosystem, Medplum accelerates the development of new healthcare products and services.
When Medplum's CTO approached Vinta, we were excited to collaborate as an extension of their development team. In addition to establishing remarkable synchronicity, we had the opportunity to dive into one of the most interesting and promising tools in healthcare today.
An easy match: Vinta and Medplum’s open-source culture
Our association with Medplum began when we collaborated with Quilted Health, a healthcare start-up we’ve featured in our cases. At that time, Quilted considered Medplum the platform for building its own EHR. From then on, our engineering team became fully immersed in the platform and gained an in-depth understanding of its intricacies.
Medplum's core technology is open-source and widely available on GitHub, which enabled our team to understand how the system worked quickly. It soon became apparent that Medplum was the right choice to meet Quilted's development goals.
We would meet weekly to present ideas we wanted to develop in Quilted, including design assets and feature requirements, and he would guide us on how to implement them following FHIR standards.
While exploring the platform, our team encountered some bugs at one point, so we submitted two pull requests. These contributions attested to the speed of our learning cycle and resulted in an Invitation to collaborate on two relevant challenges:
- Develop use cases of the platform to showcase what Medplum is capable of achieving;
- Implement integrations and real applications for their clients.
Vinta's team quickly became Medplum contributors, accelerating the development of samples and use cases. Meanwhile, our experts examined the platform in depth and understood what makes it the best choice for building an EHR.
Medplum: the headless EHR transforming healthcare development
Traditional EHRs are known to be complex software platforms, making them a daunting challenge for those who need a custom workflow. Eventually, companies face a critical decision: should they build their own EHR from scratch or integrate it with existing solutions?
Medplum solves this dilemma by working as a headless EHR. Think of it as a specialized infrastructure layer for healthcare applications. While developers focus on crafting the UI and UX, Medplum manages the heavy lifting: data storage, infrastructure, interoperability, and automation.
Medplum goes beyond just being a 'Firebase for healthcare.' It simplifies the frontend development process by providing ready-to-use, healthcare-specific React components built on Mantine, a highly regarded UI library in the developer community.
Here you can go deeper into why our CTO, Flávio Juvenal, recommends Medplum instead of building your own EHR, but here we'll bring you two key attributes we've found to be outstanding when working with Medplum:
Supports structured healthcare data exchange via FHIR standards
Built on FHIR standards, Medplum ensures data interoperability across healthcare systems. The platform supports key integrations and implements FHIR with TypeScript-type definitions, helping developers catch data structure issues during implementation while allowing flexibility through FHIR extensions.
This foundation in healthcare standards means that applications built on Medplum can readily exchange data with other systems, a fundamental requirement in today's interconnected healthcare environment.
Built-in HIPAA compliance and security features
Healthcare companies need to balance compliance requirements with product development priorities. Medplum addresses this by handling core compliance, security, and privacy features, including audit logging and authentication. This allows teams to focus on product development while maintaining healthcare data protection standards.
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Developing use cases: revealing Medplum capabilities
To showcase the platform's capabilities, our team initially started developing use cases for existing platform features. Our previous experience with Medplum and our approach to new tech stacks made this task easy to accomplish.
At Vinta, we take pride in carefully crafting teams that can autonomously solve complex problems. Combining this with a nimble project management approach can efficiently streamline any development project.
We excel at breaking requirements into actionable tasks and maintaining clear communication channels. This self-driven approach enables the Medplum team to focus on strategic priorities while trusting us to collaborate directly with their customers in building applications.
Following this constant alignment, our team has developed some use cases for the platform. These are the two main ones that are already available to be used by their clients.
Patient Intake
We have developed this example application to demonstrate how to construct a patient intake form on Medplum by gathering demographics, coverage, Social Determinants of Health, languages, and consent information:
- Converting the form data into structured data (Patient, Coverage, Observation) for easy retrieval and longitudinal tracking;
- Implementing conditional flows in questionnaires;
Using Medplum React Components to build a patient intake form.
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Some components include the patient page listing all the patients in the system, the patient chart page, the patient intake form page to fill out the intake questionnaire, and the intake form customization page, where fields can be edited.
Scheduling
We developed this example app to demonstrate how to build a scheduling app on Medplum for providers that manage the lifecycle of appointments and integrate with patient and practitioner data:
- Creating Slots to manage the provider's availability.
- Managing the Appointment lifecycle: Creating, rescheduling, and canceling appointments.
- Creating an Encounter after an appointment is completed.
- Using Medplum React Components to build a scheduling app.
Some of the components include the patient's page listing all the patients in the system, the patient's chart page, the schedule page to manage the provider availability and create new appointments, the appointment page listing all appointments for the provider and the appointment details page to view and manage the appointment lifecycle.
Next steps: Medplum integrations and upcoming applications
Looking ahead, our partnership with Medplum is set to expand even further. We're expected to work on fresh demo apps and system integrations. Our partnership with Medplum extends beyond typical implementation work. We have been actively contributing to their core platform development, proving the trust Medplum has placed in our collaboration. We are grateful to be recognized for using the platform well and for understanding its architectural choices.
We're excited about all the possibilities that could result from this collaboration, which has already proved fruitful. We're keen to see more startups benefit from building with Medplum.
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