MedLink — an experiment in digital healthcare
A platform for finding a specialist and booking an appointment — built on FHIR, the international standard for health data. Still a work in progress.
What it is
MedLink is my experiment in the hardest industry to build software for: healthcare. The idea is familiar to everyone — find a specialist, see available slots, book an appointment — but the execution hides a universe of rules, standards and edge cases.
Why FHIR
The most important decision in the project is invisible: health data doesn’t live in arbitrary tables but in FHIR — the international standard spoken by hospital information systems. That makes MedLink compatible by birth: patients, visits and schedules are described the way real systems describe them. Underneath runs Medplum — an open-source FHIR server.
On top: Meilisearch powers specialist search with results as you type, Stripe Connect makes sure money reaches the specialist directly, and an automated job sends a reminder 24 hours before the appointment.
The honest status
The core works — search, profiles, bookings. Payments and video consultations are still being finished. I keep the “in progress” label visible on purpose: in healthcare, half a product doesn’t count as a product.
What I learned
That regulated industries punish rushing. Standards here aren’t bureaucracy — they’re the accumulated experience of everyone who made the mistakes before you.