Healthcare software should be a lot better!

Have you ever seen a major health IT system up close?  Many are long in the tooth (to say the least), with heavily-interdependent proprietary components, several "one-off" connections to other legacy healthcare systems, clunky user interfaces, and ancient mainframe databases that are virtually black holes for data.

TECHNOLOGY

Under the hood, Axial looks more like a modern consumer web application than a legacy health IT system.

• Rails for development velocity
• MongoDB for high performance access to complex health IT data 
• Secure cloud environment for scalability and continuous releases
• Axial 360 (powered by MuleSoft) for interfacing with other sites and systems
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux for enterprise-grade virtualization

We believe the first step in improving health IT is to "unstick" the data--to extract it from legacy systems and distribute it to the people, applications, and services that need it. To that end, we have aligned with the good people at Mulesoft and Red Hat who also believe that open source is part of the solution for health IT.

The next step is to create applications that combine consumer-like usability with enterprise-grade security and scalability. We believe that good software should help, not hinder, the delivery of health care.

DESIGN PRINCIPLES

• Healthcare software should be simple, fast, and available on any device with a browser.

• For healthcare professionals, less can be more when the right information is presented at the right time.

• For patients, more can be more when clinical information is presented in an appropriate language and style. Patient-facing applications should use best practices from gaming and the consumer web.