Child Care Healthtech: building a platform for specialty healthcare

There is a growing trend in the digital health market for solutions that look at the patient holistically instead of just treating a condition. This strategy not only covers a greater number of people but also promotes customized therapy and builds supporting communities.

One company embracing this approach is a specialty care platform that understands its niche well. It provides personalized evaluations and holistic therapy for children and is backed by over 30 years of research. The platform brings a family-centered approach and connects people with services and communities that share the same challenge.

To establish this connection, the company uses two different applications: a mHealth app for patients’ families and a web platform for specialty care providers. Having only two months until its launch, this specialty care company approached Vinta to ideate a customized EHR that would meet the needs of these professionals and, consequently, the patients’ families as well.

Through our focused two-week Product Discovery, we delivered a validated prototype and streamlined the MVP scope, setting a clear path forward for development, which is now in full swing.

Challenge: selecting the right EHR platform while embracing practitioner experience

Most healthcare clinics know that building a compliant and interoperable solution from scratch takes work. In fact, research indicates that more than 50% of EHR systems either fail or fail to be properly utilized, with healthcare technology projects failing at a rate up to 70% of the time when failure includes project delays, substantial cost overruns, or failure to meet intended goals. Instead of risking these costly failures, healthcare organizations increasingly look for tools that help streamline product development while still attending to the requirements this industry demands. But how do they achieve standardization and customize features that meet the product's value?

This specialty care company solved this question by choosing Medplum, an open-source platform for developing healthcare applications. The platform leverages FHIR (Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources) standards and provides essential building blocks for medical charting, streamlining the initial development process. They selected Vinta based on our Medplum top-tier healthtech consultancy and a recommendation from the platform's CEO.

Our team has developed a share of previous Medplum-powered solutions, so we knew this was the best choice for building the client's portal. Starting an application on Medplum saves time in the development process and, consequently, money for founders: the platform provides ready-to-use components, bots, and serverless functions to help the healthcare company customize its code.

Although the development of the family app was not included in the prioritized scope for the MVP, the Product Discovery needed to lay the groundwork and address integration requirements and how they would take place. Our team had to consider ways to minimize synchronization points, ensuring a smooth bi-directional integration in the future, mainly because we must enable data to flow seamlessly from user sign-up on the mobile app to claim payment on a Revenue Cycle Management platform.

The core challenge lay in identifying the critical features specialty care providers needed for effective patient care through the web portal. With every patient interaction requiring documentation in our custom EHR, practitioners would depend heavily on the system's efficiency and usability. We sought to transform what was typically a time-consuming administrative process into a streamlined workflow, enabling specialty care providers to dedicate more time to what mattered most – delivering quality family care.

Integrating Medplum and Awell Health seamlessly

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Another challenge was integrating Medplum with Awell Health, the workflow management platform this specialty care company chose to help specialty care providers. Awell's solution allows teams to design and automate care flows, enabling practitioners to streamline daily operations.

Its intuitive interface allows teams to create customized clinical pathways, automate patient communications, and manage assessments seamlessly. The platform automates repetitive tasks - from patient outreach and follow-ups to clinical questionnaires and care plan updates.

We are currently in close contact with the healthcare client and Awell Health to explore platform integration possibilities. Through ongoing discussions, we're identifying the most effective ways to connect these systems, focusing on automating clinical workflows. These collaborative sessions are helping us map out a robust integration strategy to enhance care delivery.

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To address these challenges strategically, we assembled a specialized team for the client’s Product Discovery Sprint. The cross-disciplinary group (combining an experienced Project Manager, Senior Designer, and Engineer) brought together diverse perspectives essential for healthcare development. Through targeted interviews, collaborative workshops, and in-depth technical assessments, we laid the groundwork for a thorough implementation plan.

This approach helped us map immediate solutions and set the stage for our vision alignment with stakeholders and deep dive into practitioners' needs, which were crucial steps before moving into hands-on development.

The approach before going hands-on

Diving deeper into our pre-development phase (the provider portal launch was just months away) we kicked off our Product Discovery with an intensive MVP Launch alignment session, bringing together the healthcare company's stakeholders and our team. Taking this first step helped us establish precise goals and spot potential roadblocks early on, ensuring our development plan would meet both timeframes and high-quality standards, especially demanded in healthcare applications.

After establishing a comprehensive picture of the solution, we focused on understanding the healthcare practitioners relying on the platform daily. These professionals would be power users managing critical patient data, making it essential that all medical record workflows were both meticulously documented and intuitively accessible.

Through our user-centric approach, we conducted an in-depth analysis of practitioners' technical proficiency and workflow needs, validating our findings with the company's Chief Clinical Officer. This thorough understanding of our end users provided the foundation for creating detailed user journey maps to guide our development process.

Customizing the EHR for practitioners

Designing seamless interactions between the provider portal and family mobile app presented a unique challenge: ensuring data flowed effortlessly across both platforms while maintaining a clear, distinct purpose for each. Our team dove deep into mapping the complete ecosystem, analyzing how patient information would move between families and clinicians without redundancy.

Through this analysis, we created a comprehensive map of every interaction between practitioners and families, carefully documenting each touchpoint where data enters the EHR. Our mission was clear: transform traditionally manual processes into automated workflows, freeing practitioners to focus on what truly matters – providing exceptional patient care.

Armed with precise user journey insights from our Product Discovery session, we transformed clinical workflows into intuitive interfaces using Figma mockups. Our design spans the practitioner experience – from an efficiently organized patient dashboard to comprehensive care plan creation tools. By leveraging Medplum's React component library built on Mantine, we accelerated the development process without compromising quality.

This strategic use of battle-tested design systems like Mantine and MUI reflects our core approach to EHR development: building robust healthcare solutions without reinventing the wheel. By combining proven components with custom features, we deliver sophisticated systems faster and cost-effectively – creating interfaces that practitioners can master today and rely on tomorrow.

Following rigorous technical validation of Medplum components, FHIR resources, and system feasibility, our engineering team crafted a strategic roadmap to speed up development. This blueprint optimally balanced Medplum's powerful pre-built components with this specialty care company's custom EHR requirements, establishing a clear path to rapid implementation while ensuring every critical feature was accounted for.

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Technical assets: derisking the development journey

A crucial outcome of our Product Discovery was a comprehensive Technical Assessment that significantly diminished development risks. This document outlined technical implementation guidelines and offered insight into system design choices. 

For the healthcare company, this translated into an actionable development document, from detailed FHIR resource specifications to proven Medplum strategies and precise system integration mapping. Here's how each component accelerates secure development:

Medplum Admin

This user-facing web application is a quick way to administer projects, manage users, create access policies, groups, and even administrative tasks. It’s a ready-to-use application, so facilitating system management by not building a custom Admin was an efficient decision.

Patient Charting

Building upon Medplum's sample patient charting flow, we've developed an expanded and customized patient charting system that helps practitioners manage patient data efficiently. Our enhanced design introduces a user-friendly interface tailored to clinicians' needs, featuring comprehensive timelines, detailed care plans, customizable group management, and structured encounter documentation. While maintaining Medplum integration and FHIR compliance for seamless healthcare data exchange, we've extended the original functionality

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While Medplum's pre-built components accelerate development, we carefully navigated FHIR's structural limitations during the design process. These healthcare standards restrict certain data operations, like filtering by status or join date. Our design team turned this challenge into an opportunity, creating intuitive workarounds that maintained compliance while enhancing user functionality.

Clinical Operations

Medplum's strength lies in its robust support for clinical operations through built-in features like task management and scheduling. By providing customizable sample projects, Medplum offers a foundation that can be tailored to meet specific healthcare workflows, allowing organizations to rapidly implement and adapt essential operational tools.

Here we worked on scheduling using an integration from Cal.com, a scheduling platform that simplifies the process of scheduling meetings and managing notes. This happens through webhooks, which allow you to list event triggers that take place within third-party apps. The webhook is programmed to respond to specific events, such as status updates — in this case, when invitees schedule, cancel, or reschedule events, or when the meeting ends. You can learn more about webhooks here.

Next steps: roadmap to reality, preparing to launch

The Product Discovery phase exceeded expectations, with the client's team excited by our rapid delivery. In just two weeks, our team delivered powerful results across critical areas:

• Product Strategy Validation: Thoroughly assessed and confirmed the strategic direction, ensuring alignment with both provider needs and user personas through comprehensive stakeholder interviews;
• User Journey Mapping: Created detailed portal navigation flows that capture every crucial touchpoint in the practitioner's daily workflow, from patient intake to care plan management;
• Journey Visualization: Developed fidelity mockups that bring the user experience to life, demonstrating intuitive interfaces for clinical documentation and patient management;‍
• Strategic Roadmap Development: Crafted a detailed MVP delivery timeline with clearly defined phases, ensuring a balanced approach between rapid deployment and feature completeness.

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"I love the tangibility that Vinta brought to our provider portal. What they put together in 2 weeks is impressive."

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Our strategic design approach prioritizes clinicians, streamlining their workflow so they can focus on their core mission. Building on this foundation, we've transitioned into active development with a specialized team (two dedicated developers and a fractional manager) driving rapid, iterative delivery cycles.

We're energized to bring this transformative healthcare solution to life and look forward to sharing its impact on practitioners and families they serve. Follow our journey as we transform this vision into reality, and discover more about our proven MVP development approach, which helps healthcare innovators like this platform bring their solutions to market.

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