Hi HN! Cody, Reshma, and Rahul here and we’re building Medplum (
https://www.medplum.com), an open-source platform that lets you quickly build complex healthcare applications. We provide a headless EHR (electronic health record) that supports common standards like FHIR, HL7 and more. You build whatever UI and UX you want, and we handle the infrastructure and give you lots of interoperability and automation tools.
The digital healthcare space has been hampered by proprietary tech, walled gardens, and vendor lock-in. Working as healthcare app developers ourselves, we kept seeing organizations developing the same infrastructure over and over. The question “how is this stuff not open source?” came up so often that we finally decided to just build it.
Out of the box, Medplum includes:
- Auth - An end-to-end identity solution for easy user authentication, sign-in, and permissions using OAuth, OpenID, and SMART App Launch
- Clinical Data Repository (CDR) - A back-end server that hosts your healthcare data in a secure, compliant, vendor neutral, and standards based repository
- A FHIR-based API for sending, receiving, and manipulating data
- SDK - Client libraries that simplify the process of interacting with our API or any FHIR server
- A web application where you can view your data, perform basic editing tasks
- UI Component Library - React components designed to help you quickly develop custom healthcare applications
- Medplum Bots - Write and run application logic server-side without needing to set up your own server
Our team has years of experience in healthcare technology. We were the founders of MedXT (YC W13) and have held engineering leadership roles at Box and One Medical.
Our repo is at https://github.com/medplum/medplum and you can see a demo video here: https://youtu.be/nf6OElRWOJ4. There’s a sample app at https://foomedical.com, with code at https://github.com/medplum/foomedical.
Medplum is under the Apache 2.0 license so any developer can use it for free with no strings attached. We make money through enterprise integrations, and by providing a hosted version and support. Compliance is a priority—we are SOC 2 and HIPAA compliant and are pursuing ONC and HITRUST. Our hosted service runs on AWS and uses cloud infrastructure similar to a typical SaaS application. This is also rare in healthcare.
We would love to know what you think - especially any recommendations or ideas you want to share, and would love to hear about your experiences developing healthcare applications!
If/since this is a freemium model, can you talk about the kinds of features you would end up charging for?
The 2019 state of open-source EHR is reported here: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6517630/
It would be interesting if published an assessment of your status and plans using their criteria.
I've seen practices successfully using two of the recommended EHR systems. Technically most seem in the ballpark, but the key seems to be whether there is a robust community validating the code and providing timely support. In that respect, another open-source alternative is not necessarily a good thing. Do you have any community-building hires in mind?
As for clients: the adopters are often medical people who picked up enough technology to wire things together, and do so for their practice employees. They're not super interested in sharing the secret sauce of their practice with consultants who will simply repurpose that knowledge for the competition. The most successful OS EHR's seem to be configurable by these adopters.
But it seems medplum targets developers (not the practice professional). If (since) those developers may have a tough time, do you have designs to pivot to new low-code approaches for end-user?
Conversely, if you stick with the EHR-AAS back end, the trend of the last few years has been for private equity to buy practice groups. I don't see yet the incremental value for the adopter or users of your offering over existing EHR's. But equity would be super eager to buy practices with EHR's ready to audit for due diligence before purchase and ready to integrate after. That could be a selling point for practice managers. Do you have any biz-dev plans to coordinate with the equity groups playing in the medical space, or investments from them, to tide you over the long process of gaining mindshare in a conservative market?