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Launch HN: Medplum (YC S22) – Open-Source Firebase for Healthcare
Hi HN! Cody, Reshma, and Rahul here and we’re building Medplum (https://www.medplum.com 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 https://github.com/medplum/medplum and you can see a demo video here: https://youtu.be/nf6OElRWOJ4 https://youtu.be/nf6OElRWOJ4. There’s a sample app at https://foomedical.com https://foomedical.com, with code at https://github.com/medplum/foomedical 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!
- dtran 4y agoCongrats on the launch Rahul, Cody, and Reshma! A headless EHR sounds so cool! Why did y'all decide to describe it as Firebase, and has that description resonated well with potential users/customers?
- brown 4y agoThat's a great question. Healthcare tech is a big and diverse space, and we are still honing a product description that speaks to all audiences. Among technical decision makers (Software Engineers, Architects, etc), the Firebase analogy clicks much faster. Among traditional healthcare administrators, "EHR" or "API first EHR" or "Headless EHR" resonate more. We're definitely open to suggestions!
- dpayonk 4y agoHeadless EMR resonates best with me because of the parallel to other cms solutions like contentful. I’d spend time making sure you validate your point of view on the persona of the technical decision makers. The EMR decision for an early stage healthtech company is 10x more important than your initial cloud provider.
- wes-k 4y agoSurely you must have considered FHIRbase :P
- brown 4y agoHaha, yes, but someone got there first, with a now abandoned project.
- bluepuma77 4y agoWow, what a coincidence. Yesterday I attended an e-health event in EU and found several business opportunities for small FHIR applications for hospitals. We already have SaaS hospital customers, so I began my research. We are working with HL7v2 ADT, FHIR seems like a very different more complex beast. Nice that they use JSON, but it reminds me a lot of those XML days with lots of namespaces, you always needed an editor. There is a fhirbase/fhirbase Docker container that wasn't updated for 3 years, they focus on AidBox now, it's closed source, no public pricing. There is even an ibmcom/ibm-fhir-server Docker container, 2 months old, but their project page https://ibm.github.io/FHIR https://ibm.github.io/FHIR is gone. Then I came across this article from better.care CTO talking about how openEHR and FHIR should be used in a combined system, which seems to make sense. Product seems to be closed source, no public pricing, made in the EU. https://medium.com/@alastairallen/fhir-openehr-2022-53716f837340 https://medium.com/@alastairallen/fhir-openehr-2022-53716f83... There is ehrserver, open source, but not a single word about FHIR https://github.com/ppazos/cabolabs-ehrserver https://github.com/ppazos/cabolabs-ehrserver So there is a lot happening, will check out Medplum, FHIR seems the future :-)