I Fired My EHR. Then I Built My Own Patient Portal on a Saturday Night.

Let me set the scene.

Saturday night. Ginger ale, hold the Tito’s. Tortoiseshell glasses pushed up on my head. Mac Studio humming. And me, a nurse practitioner who has never written a line of code in her life, building a patient portal from scratch.

Not tweaking a template. Not paying a tech company $400 a month for the privilege of clicking through 14 screens to refill one prescription. Building my own. With my name on it, my colors, my voice. And absolutely zero ugly.

How did I get here? Pull up a chair.

Inning 1I have tried every EHR. Every. Single. One.

If you’re not in healthcare, an EHR is an electronic health record. It’s the software your provider stares at while you talk. It’s why your appointment feels like a hostage situation with a keyboard.

I have used them all. The big ones, the “modern” ones, the ones with a cute logo that promise to “streamline your workflow.” The best of the bunch still felt like doing my taxes inside a 2009 website. Ugly, clunky, slow. Did I mention ugly?

And here’s the thing nobody says out loud: most of that software isn’t built for patients. It isn’t even built for providers. It’s built for billing. For insurance codes, prior authorizations and the 47 boxes somebody somewhere needs checked before anyone gets paid.

I don’t take insurance. I’m a direct-pay, cash-only practice. No billing codes, no prior auths, no “let me check with your plan.” Just me and you, figuring it out.

So why on earth was I paying for software designed around a system I deliberately walked away from?

Inning 2I’m not spending my last 40 years charting

I said this out loud recently, and I meant it: I refuse to spend the 40-ish years I have left on this planet sitting on my butt writing ridiculous medical notes nobody reads.

That’s not why I became a nurse practitioner. I didn’t go into medicine to become a data-entry clerk with a prescription pad. I went into it for the conversation. The “okay, so what’s really going on?” moment. The patient who finally feels heard.

So years ago I built my own system out of tools that actually work: a simple form for intake, a spreadsheet to keep track of everyone, an app on my phone to send prescriptions, and Square to text you an invoice you can pay in two taps. No bloated EHR. Patients loved it. I loved it.

What it didn’t have was a front door. A place for you.

Inning 3A patient said the thing out loud

The push came from a patient (and friend) who does cybersecurity for hospital systems for a living. He looked at my website and asked me something that stuck:

“Did you want this to feel collaborative? Because right now it kind of feels like picking from a menu.”

Ouch. And also: correct.

The whole reason I do this my way is that most people don’t need more information. Dr. Google has plenty. They need someone in their corner who’ll help them sort it out without making them feel dumb for asking.

So I asked myself: what if your patient portal felt like that? What if it felt like me?

Inning 4Enter my build partner

I’ll be honest with you, because that’s kind of my whole thing: I didn’t do this alone. I built it with an AI, Claude, as my build partner.

Before you roll your eyes: no, the AI is not your doctor. It doesn’t see patients, it doesn’t make medical decisions, and nothing clinical goes out without me reading every word and signing off. It’s a ridiculously patient developer who doesn’t mind when I say “make it prettier” for the fourteenth time at midnight.

Inning 5What we built in one weekend

Here’s what a patient will be able to do from their phone:

And it opens with the line that sums up the whole thing:

It even works like an app. Save it to your home screen and my little red SR icon sits right there next to your other apps.

Inning 6And then I let my patients break it

Here’s where it gets fun. Before a single real patient uses it, I handed a test version to a few of my favorite people and said: try to break it.

Spoiler: they did. Refill requests that vanished into the void. An upload button that didn’t. A calendar glitch. Questions I hadn’t even thought of, like “where’s the list of who still owes you money?” and “what about sales tax?”

That’s next week’s episode. Because I’m going to show you all of it: the wins, the fails, the fixes, and the boring-but-scary grown-up stuff (privacy, lawyers, taxes) that nobody posts about.

Inning 7Why I’m telling you this

Because healthcare doesn’t have to feel like a hostage situation with a keyboard. Because “that’s just how the system works” has never been a good enough answer for me. And because if a nurse practitioner with a coffee habit and zero coding experience can build her own front door on a Saturday night, maybe the system isn’t as stuck as we’ve been told.

Follow along. I’ll show you everything. No BS.