Medplum Talk at MITRE OHS | Medplum
Medplum Intro and Team Story
Intro by Mick O'Hanlon
Welcome to today's OHS Tech Talk. Today we are very lucky to be joined by Reshma Khilnani, who will be giving a talk titled Medplum FHIR Native Web Apps. Reshma is the CEO at Medplum, which is an open source toolkit for building FHIR native web apps. Reshma has an experience as a Visiting Partner at Y Combinator and as a two-time founder in healthcare. She is also an alumna at Meta, Microsoft, Box and BS and MEng course six at MIT. Reshma will cover the opportunity and challenges in developing apps that use FHIR as their data model. She'll also discuss Medplum's business model and how they hope to make a living off of open source.
Today's material will include demos and Medplum getting started tutorial.
Reshma Khilnani
So what is Medplum? Medplum is a open source toolkit to build FHIR native web applications. At the highest level, that's what it is. Before we dive two into the details with a little story about our founding team.
So these are our founders. We myself, Cody, and Rahul, notably you'll notice we have a crossover career. I myself have done venture capital, I was early-ish on the team at Facebook. Cody has a career from Microsoft and he was at One Medical as well on the provider side and, Rahul at Palantir and Applied Intuition....
Healthcare Developer Pain Points
We experience the following pain points. I think there first we'll call it the terrible choice, so I'll go into this in a bit of detail, but basically while developing your application, you have to make some trade-offs and it's, it's possible to leave with the impression that, you know, you don't have any good choices.
So integrations and workflow in healthcare are very difficult, harder, I believe, than other sectors like FinTech to build and maintain. So this is a common problem. And the regulated environment is part of it. The vendor mix is part of it, but in general, this is just an extremely challenging aspect of developing healthcare.
Third. And I'm very interested to hear from this team in particular on this front is poor data quality is rampant. Duplication issues, you can't compare records that exist in different institutions. There's lots of subtle issues with the data that make it hard to trust and if you're writing an application and you want it to have good quality data, for example, to report HEDIS or something like that, this is often an enormous lift for developers.
So this is a, it's a big problem. And fourth, which I think is related to the first three, is that talent is very scarce....
System Overview
And the approach is simple. The API is the product. Tery headless product that is interop-ready and features that are designed to be programmed.
Here's an overview of the system: the core Medplum application, then this is an open source application, is right here in purple and this is a source code that you can get on. Internet. It has a data store, FHIR data store, and a FHIR Rest API. And so that's a big part of it.
We've invested heavily in the TypeScript SDK....
Developer Experience and Open Source
And we hope for a lot of attention to detail on the developer experience. We consider testing and test-driven development, CI/CD and documentation as products. And there are things that we deliver and part of our offering and of course our open source. Open source has a lot of interesting characteristics that are unexpected.
If you are composing complicated systems to implement an application that's very functional, that has to do a lot of things and support lots of features enable to do that effectively. Open source is just a great tool. It's a way for an individual contributor to make a lot of progress without being gummed up with a lot of meetings and compliance and access issues....
Business Model
So, That's where we are so far and our business model. So we're really focused on hosting and we have our hosted product app.medplum.com where you can sign up, start building your application....
Demos
So first of all, I'm gonna demo the following things:
- First the admin console for developers
- Next, a sample patient portal
- A sample custom EHR
- I'll show our storybook, which is our react components
- Demo of our documentation because as I mentioned documentation is a big part of the product....