Client background and challenges
Medplum is an open-source developer platform for healthcare tech (YC S22) with a mission to make healthcare software development fast, easy, and actually enjoyable. Clients using their platform get a solid foundation for their use case, so they can focus on building what they need and not infrastructure—all while compliant with US law.
For some context, they initially targeted a more technical audience (like CTOs from MedTech startups). In order to market their product effectively to practitioners and hospitals (who didn’t necessarily have a strong technical infrastructure), they needed a way to explain what could be achieved with their platform. This is where their demo app, the Provider App, came into play.
Looking at the short term and long term
Medplum’s initial request was to streamline this out-of-the-box Provider App experience to better represent the products that could be built using their technology. (A perfect match for Evil Martians, with our developer tool experience!)
During our work, we realized this demo app could be more than separate pieces showcasing specific possibilities, but a full-featured Electronic Health Record EHR with the potential to be used by various medical practices as is—either white-labeled or on a SaaS model.
So, the short-term goal was to keep adding specific features to the demo, while our team introduced and worked with a longer-term objective in mind: solidifying the overall experience into a sturdy, standalone product.
Tackling the initial experience
We started with the Encounter page. (“Encounter” is a common term used in MedTech that describes an event involving patient communication, mainly during office visits or telehealth visits.) In this case, the Encounter page lets practitioners store their notes during the visit and fill in necessary questionnaires.
We needed to add the templates to the page, allowing practitioners to add predefined lists of tasks to an encounter. Medplum hoped to demonstrate the agile and template-based nature of the platform, allowing practices to build a workflow relatable to their needs, not just a one-size-fits-all solution.
