What is a Headless EHR?
Tags: devops, cloud, startup
Published: 2023-05-12 18:50:12

Electronic Health Records (EHRs) are used to store medical information. If you’ve ever been a patient at a hospital or clinic, it’s likely your data is stored in an EHR.

A headless EHR is an EHR without a user interface — all data is accessed programmatically. It provides APIs (Application Programming Interface) for retrieving and updating medical data. User-facing applications are built using the APIs.

Headless EHRs provide flexibility when building simple or complex healthcare applications — with a traditional EHR it can be challenging to interact with medical information and other systems, but headless EHRs are designed to be interacted with programmatically. You can choose how and when your backend interacts with frontend systems, such as a website or patient app, using an API.

We’re building a headless EHR called Oystehr.

Pros

Building from scratch is a riskier path, but the largest pro of building with a headless platform is that it lets organizations customize EHRs. Traditional EHRs may ‘customize’ out-of-the-box offerings for individual organizations, but this short-term solution can only do so much contrasted with custom software built with unique use cases in mind from the get-go. Traditional EHRs often come with a large number of features that make their system bulkier and harder to use — and even then the EHR may be missing features organizations want. 

With a headless EHR, you have control to design and build the entire system. This means you can choose which features to build – and what to exclude or delay as your organization grows. We believe headless EHRs will continue to grow — and if they do, it’s likely applications will be built on top of them that you will be able to use. 

Another advantage of headless EHRs is cost: while the upfront cost to build may be higher, the long-term costs are likely significantly lower than with a traditional EHR. When you sign up for a traditional EHR, you risk being siloed into an EHR you’re unhappy with until the end of the contract period. Transitioning to another traditional EHR carries the same risks, plus the added costs of converting and exporting patient data between potentially non-interoperable formats. Oystehr charges usage-based pricing. If you decide you aren’t happy, you can switch to another EHR because you haven’t signed any contracts, and the records are stored as industry-standard FHIR for easy exportation.

Cons

While we think that building on top of a headless EHR will give you a better application in the long run of your organization's growth, some companies may not want to take on the risk of going with a headless EHR. Unlike a traditional EHR, which comes with a pre-built user interface, an organization that chooses to go headless may need to build and customize an EHR, or to work with an already-built frontend. 

The planning involved in creating a complete and flexible headless EHR system means that the time to get up and running is longer. Traditional EHRs give you a fast speed to market with something that “works just enough”.

All in all, the up-front costs to getting started with a headless EHR will likely be higher than with a traditional EHR. We know that headless EHRs aren’t for everybody. But if you’ve tried building on top of traditional EHRs — and gotten frustrated just as we did — a headless EHR may be worth considering.

Want to read the full post? You can do so here on our blog: https://oystehr.com/post/what-is-a-headless-ehr