Every pediatrician knows the strain of a cluttered and convoluted Electronic Health Record (EHR) system. The age-old EHR systems, teeming with irrelevant fields and buttons, can bring back painful memories. What exacerbates this is that these traditional EHRs are focused on appointments and billing instead of being focused on providing care.
Summer Health focuses on direct-to-consumer care that's available around the clock. We're not just streamlining healthcare for parents; we're tailoring it for the pediatricians so they can provide the highest quality care without being burdened by outdated tech.
We envision a healthcare experience that enables quality care without sacrificing simplicity and security. From this vision, CareOS was born. However, creating a new healthcare experience from the ground up takes a lot of work, and we're not interested in reinventing the wheel. This post covers some core concepts that were and continue to be important to us as we build a world-class healthcare experience.
The Right Foundation
The fastest way to a skeptical look is by telling someone you're going to build an EHR from scratch. It's a daunting task, and skepticism is warranted. That's why while we knew we needed a better experience for our pediatricians, building everything from scratch wasn't the right approach. We explored different headless and headed options, weighing the limitations and expenses. We needed the flexibility to build a custom experience without committing to a future operational nightmare.
That's where Medplum came into play. Developer-friendly and forward-thinking, Medplum's healthcare platform resonated with our vision and allowed us to build a high quality experience without starting from 0.
Identity Management
Being a seed-stage company, Summer Health must keep the identities involved in healthcare flexible. As we evolve and uncover new product dimensions, there's a pressing need for adaptability. Yet, security remains paramount and clinical data access needs to be restricted only to pertinent entities.
Recognizing this, we aimed for a healthcare platform that offers flexible identity management. So whether it’s a Summer Health employee, a partnering practitioner or a parent, we can operate in one environment under one auth umbrella.
Access Control
Figuring out identity management was just the tip of the iceberg. Pediatrics has a unique challenge in terms of data access. Unlike other specialties, a pediatric patient's clinical data must be accessible by different identities, like parents or guardians. So, how do we ensure that the right individuals have the correct access while ensuring the confidentiality and integrity of the data? This complexity needs a nuanced approach to access control, and we needed a platform with an answer.
Everything is on FHIR 🔥
Our vision was broader than the present. We knew our data storage methods today would impact future interoperability with partners and other healthcare systems. This led us to FHIR (Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources), a standard framework for clinical data storage. Adopting FHIR meant ensuring our data remains legible outside the confines of Summer Health, promising a brighter future for our patients and their relationships with other clinical entities.
Mobile First
Our pediatricians, much like our parents, rely on mobile devices. The availability of Summer Health across the US, every single day of the week, 24 hours a day, is rooted in mobile accessibility. It's pivotal for our pediatricians to provide uninterrupted, high-quality care, irrespective of their location. We wanted to craft a user-friendly, mobile-first experience for them, ensuring they have all the necessary information at their fingertips to provide the highest quality care.
More to Come
Summer Health’s path to revolutionize pediatric care starts with ensuring our pediatricians have the best tools to provide the best care. We’ll continue to share more about how we’re building CareOS as we continue this journey. In the meantime, you can learn more details about our integration with Medplum in the case study: 24/7 Pediatrician Access - Summer Health Case Study