Emily EMR

Overview

Emily EMR is a clinical record a doctor can actually chart in during a visit, not after it. Notes, orders, labs and results live on one patient timeline, so the next clinician who opens the chart sees the whole story instead of reassembling it from five systems.

The client runs a multi-specialty clinic group and had outgrown a legacy EMR that predated cloud software — fast to type into but impossible to integrate with anything modern.

The Problem

Charting was slow enough that staff had started keeping a shadow system — sticky notes and spreadsheets — because the existing software couldn't keep up with a live consultation. Orders, labs and results lived in separate tools with no shared timeline, so the next clinician had to reassemble the story from scratch.

• A single generic note field forced every specialty into the same template, so nobody's notes were structured enough to search.
• Lab results arrived by fax or a separate portal, hours after the order, with no link back to the visit that requested them.
• The existing audit log only recorded who logged in, not what they actually read or changed.

How We Solved It

We built structured, specialty-specific charting fast enough to use mid-consultation, with orders, labs, imaging and results landing on one patient timeline automatically. The audit trail was built into the schema from day one — not bolted on later for a certification checklist — so every read and write is accounted for without slowing anyone down.

• Structured charting with templates per specialty, not a single generic note field.
• Orders and results on the same timeline as the visit that requested them.
• Field-level, role-based access — a receptionist and a physician see different slices of the same chart.
• Integration hooks for lab systems, pharmacies and billing, so the record stays the source of truth.

Key Decisions

• Templates per specialty, not one generic note. Cardiology and dermatology chart differently, and forcing them into the same field was the root cause of the slowdown.
• Every read gets logged, not just every write. An auditor asking who viewed a record needs an answer, not just who edited one.
• HL7/FHIR at the integration boundary, not a proprietary format. Lab and pharmacy partners had to be able to plug in without custom work on their side.

The Result

Clinicians chart in real time instead of catching up after hours, and the shadow spreadsheets have gone away because the system is finally faster than they were. Every action is audit-ready by default, which turned the last compliance review into a formality instead of a fire drill.

Average charting time per visit dropped by roughly a third, and lab results now land on the patient timeline within minutes of being reported instead of hours.