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Decision Guides

Use these guides to make application design, workflow, and rollout decisions before implementation. Each guide connects your requirements to recommended approaches, data models, and downstream responsibilities.

Use the guides and technical docs together: the guide explains which approach fits your situation and what it requires; the linked technical docs provide configuration, APIs, and implementation examples.

Application Design​

Define the identity, tenancy, and access rules shared across your workflows.

Authentication​

Choose account matching, identity providers, and token-flow architecture, including client or server token storage and user-scoped access versus On-Behalf-Of.

Access Control and Tenancy​

Scope your authorization model – user types and organizational structure, multi-tenancy and patient/practitioner sharing, role inventory and permission mechanics, admin structure, and optional patterns like SMART on FHIR and IP access rules.

Clinical and Operational Workflows​

Decide how people and systems carry out a clinical or operational process, including ownership, handoffs, and exceptions.

Intake & Registration​

Scope your intake workflow – who completes it and when, identity and duplicate handling, form library, prefill and reconciliation, extraction approach (SDC vs. Bot), coverage and consent modeling, and post-submission automation.

Scheduling​

Scope your scheduling workflow – visit types, actors and availability, patient preferences and eligibility, multi-resource booking, capacity, holds, appointment lifecycle, and integrations.

Charting​

Scope your charting workflow – care setting and visit types, how structured the chart should be, parsing form responses into queryable data, signing requirements, and Visit Template ownership.

Diagnostic Orders​

Choose how to order labs and imaging, coordinate fulfillment, match incoming results, and assign review and follow-up. Compare external interfaces, internal testing, and results-only workflows, including imaging storage and viewer choices.

E-Prescribe​

Scope your e-prescribing workflow – hosted iframe vs. custom workflow, controlled substances, prescriber enrollment and identity verification, and vendor integration approach.

Referrals​

Scope your referral workflow – which sides of the lifecycle you build (send, receive, or both), referral semantics and coding, capture flow and recipient directory, what clinical context to carry, transmission channels, lifecycle and assignment, and closure round-trip.

Care Coordination​

Scope operational workflows across the practice: top-of-license delegation, shared queues and ownership, handoffs and deadlines, longitudinal cases, care plans and goals, protocols, clinical decision support, and follow-through.

Messaging & Communications​

Scope your messaging workflow – thread structure, live updates, routing and assignment, read receipts, attachments, drafts and editing, automations, external channels (SMS, email), and async encounter billing.

RCM & Billing​

Scope your billing workflow – charge capture, claims and clearinghouse integration, eligibility checks, coding and fee schedules, remittance and reconciliation, and patient billing.

Implementation and Rollout​

Plan the transition to Medplum and how your team will validate and introduce the application into use.

Data Migration​

Scope a migration to Medplum – source-system inventory, data ownership, identity and mapping governance, import operations, validation, testing, cutover, and acceptance.

More guides will be added as additional workflow areas are scoped. If you'd like a guide for a workflow not listed here, reach out on our Discord or email support@medplum.com.