Learn why we're building Ottehr, this open-source EHR and telehealth app, built on top of Oystehr's headless EHR. Customizable, interoperable, and free–empowering healthcare startups.
A bit of background: Our team has been building health-tech software for more than a decade. First for startups, then integrating with EHRs as the startups were acquired, and finally fielding requests from the large clinical organizations to replace their EHRs entirely.
Building software in this environment was a muddy slog. Projects that might take a few hundred hours in a non-medical vertical took a few thousand hours. Even though many of the back-end requirements were common across projects, there was no cloud-provider offering health-tech specific services. So we built one.
Oystehr successfully reduced time-to-market for a custom EHR by about 40%. Quite significant, but not enough. We needed to reduce the entire effort by an order of magnitude for custom EHRs to become broadly feasible.
We knew this because we are building a custom EHR in partnership with the largest pediatric urgent care provider. Even with Oystehr as the back-end, we scoped the front-end for their production-ready, full-scope EHR to thirty people over two years. You can see why an order of magnitude reduction is necessary for the average clinical organization.
Fortunately, a solution presented itself. PM Pediatrics generously allowed us to release the codebase of the EHR we were building together as an open-source product called Ottehr. Ottehr is unlike any other open source EHR. It is designed for developers-first. While it can be used as a standalone product, Ottehr exists mainly to be forked and modified. You are free (in every sense of the word) to create, rebrand and resell commercial products derived from Ottehr and we’ll help you do it. Just reach out.
Today Ottehr is available as a HIPAA compliant telemedicine platform. Providers can conduct video calls and chats with patients and manage their waiting rooms. You can think of it as an open source alternative to other commercial bolt-on telemed platforms.
However, Ottehr is well on its way to becoming a full scope EHR with support for registration, intake, scheduling, charting, eRx, lab and imaging orders, real-time insurance validation, claims submission, payment processing and RCM. The first feature complete release of Ottehr will occur in June ‘24. In the meantime we will release source month by month, module by module. Check out our roadmap. And as an open-source platform, we always welcome your pull requests.
