Venture 001 · in production
MedSys
A complete EMR platform for clinics that still run on paper.
- Sector
- Healthcare
- Engagement
- Studio venture
- Live since
- 2024 —
01 — Challenge
A folder is only in one room at a time.
A busy clinic runs on paper folders. The folder holds the history, the last prescription, and the laboratory slips stapled inside the back cover. It works, in the narrow sense that it has always worked, right up to the moment two departments need it simultaneously.
Then the failures start, and they are always the same failures. A laboratory result comes back and cannot find the order that generated it. A pharmacy dispenses against a prescription it cannot read. Billing reconstructs a visit at the end of the day from memory and a stack of slips. Nobody is negligent; the medium simply cannot be in two places at once.
Clinics that had bought software mostly were not using it. The systems on offer assumed reliable power, reliable bandwidth, and a clinician willing to type during a consultation. For these clinics all three assumptions are wrong, so the software became a data-entry chore performed after hours — or abandoned.
02 — Approach
Research in the corridor, not the conference room.
We started by following the folder. Not interviewing administrators about the folder — following it, through registration, triage, consultation, the laboratory, the dispensary, and billing, watching where it stalled and who went looking for it.
Three findings shaped everything after. The queue, not the record, is what the clinic actually runs on. Clinicians will accept a screen in the room only if it does not take their eyes off the patient. And any system that stops working during an outage will be abandoned within a month, because the clinic cannot stop working during an outage.
03 — System
Seven departments, one record.
Each department gets an interface shaped to its own job, and every one of them writes to the same record. An order placed in a consulting room appears in the laboratory worklist without anyone carrying anything.
- 01
Front desk
Registration and queue
One search field resolves a returning patient by name, phone, or folder number. New registrations take under a minute and issue the queue token the rest of the clinic works from.
- 02
Doctor
Consultation and orders
The consultation screen holds history, vitals, and active medication in one view. Orders for laboratory, imaging, and pharmacy are placed here and appear immediately in those queues.
- 03
Nursing
Vitals and observations
Vitals recorded at triage populate the doctor's view before the patient sits down. Observation notes are timestamped and attributed without anyone typing a name.
- 04
Laboratory
Specimens and results
Requests arrive as a worklist, not a paper slip. Results attach to the order that generated them, which closes the loop that paper systems lose most often.
- 05
Pharmacy
Dispensing and stock
The dispensing queue shows what was prescribed, what is in stock, and what has already been collected. Interaction and dosage checks run before the drug leaves the counter.
- 06
Imaging
Studies and reports
Imaging requests carry the clinical question with them, so the reporting radiographer is not guessing at what the referring doctor wanted to know.
- 07
Billing
Charges and insurance
Charges accumulate from the orders themselves rather than being reconstructed at the end. Insurance and cash paths are handled in the same ledger.
04 — Intelligence
Automation that shows its working.
Three places where the system does something on its own. In each one it has to be able to explain the decision, and a clinician has to be able to overrule it on the record.
01
Voice dictation that structures SOAP notes
A doctor speaks the consultation as they would to a colleague. The system separates subjective, objective, assessment, and plan into the correct fields, and leaves the raw transcript attached so nothing is lost in the structuring. The doctor edits rather than types.
02
Drug-interaction alerts with a severity floor
Interaction checks run at prescribing and again at dispensing. Only interactions that would change the prescription are allowed to interrupt; the rest are recorded to the chart without a modal. Alert fatigue is treated as a design failure, not a user problem.
03
Dosage verification against patient context
Dosages are checked against weight, age, renal function where recorded, and the drug's own limits. When the system disagrees with a prescription it says which input drove the objection, so the prescriber can overrule it on the record.
05 — Outcome
It survives a Tuesday.
MedSys is in production. The seven departments run on one record, the queue is the spine of the interface rather than a report, and the clinic keeps registering patients when the grid goes down.
The architectural decision that mattered most was the least visible one. Stock is written as a delta rather than an absolute, so two dispensers working offline through the same queue produce a ledger that reconciles without a merge and without losing units. That choice is invisible in a demo and decisive in a clinic.
We continue to operate it. Support, iteration, and uptime stay with the studio, which is what keeps the research honest — every wrong assumption comes back as a support ticket with a clinic’s name on it.
Venture 003 · in development
Supply and inventory for pharmacies without same-day resupply.
- Research in progress with dispensaries already running MedSys.
- The question we are answering first: what does a stock-out actually cost a clinic that cannot reorder same-day?
Next
Read how the studio operates what it builds.