Launch HN: Medplum (YC S22) – Open-Source Firebase for Healthcare

251 points

4 years ago

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!

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