Technology at One Medical

Updated March 1, 2024.

There is a lot of tech in healthcare, but it’s not fixing anything.

I’ve been hearing for years that tech is going to save healthcare.

First, it was electronic health records (EHRs) and patient portals, then telehealth, then wearables and apps, and now it’s AI; each heralded as the key to a revolution in quality and cost. In any one of these categories, you can point to companies valued in the billions who seem like they should be having an impact. Healthcare should feel like every other industry, totally transformed by tech. But it’s not.

2021 through the first half of 2022 saw the largest healthtech investments in history. For five quarters in a row, $10 - 12 billion was invested. Yet here we are, still calling for appointments and faxing prior auths.

You don’t need me to explain all the ways healthcare is broken. You’ve read the articles. You’ve experienced it yourself or through someone you care about. What is often missing from the conversation, however, is that technology is everywhere in healthcare but with one critical flaw: these systems don’t talk to each other. This inability to communicate is not just a problem between parts of the healthcare system, but within hospitals or even individual clinics. Health tech has moved individual processes off of paper, sure, but it has failed to facilitate communication and teamwork among the people providing the care.

We’re not just building tech for tech’s sake. We’re solving real problems.

At One Medical, we create technology that builds and empowers relationships between our patients and clinicians. We recently joined forces with Amazon and, together, Amazon and One Medical will help more people get better care, when and how they need it. Since 2007, One Medical has been on a mission to help transform healthcare through its human-centered and technology-powered model that makes it convenient for people to access the care they need through its seamless in-person and virtual services. With Amazon, we have our sights set on making it even easier for customers to to get and stay healthy, delivering further positive impacts for consumers, employers, care teams and health networks.

Most healthcare organizations buy third-party software, cobbling together the needs of their business across disparate, specialized, and isolated tools. Our interest is in creating an ecosystem of technology with which our clinicians can practice the best possible healthcare. We call that ecosystem 1Life. We’ve built our technology from the ground up to be integrated across our organization and, moreover, to make communication and collaboration easy.

1Life’s heart is an EHR and charting system designed and built alongside clinicians to be the easiest way to record and read patient care information. But that’s just the beginning. The foundation of our EHR is a modern tech stack, using technologies like React, GraphQL and OpenSearch. We support FHIR, making interoperability central to care, and use machine learning to simplify workflows. 1Life also includes our scheduling, administrative, tasking, and messaging platforms, as well as our patient web portal and native iOS and Android apps.

1Life connects patients to clinicians and clinicians to each other.

Not only does 1Life connect our members to our care teams, it connects our care teams to one another. We’ve built out robust internal tasking and communications systems so that everyone who helps a patient — doctor, phlebotomist, admin, or anyone else — has relevant context and history, as well as all the tools necessary to get that person what they need.

For example, if you start a Video Chat, the clinician on the line will have access to your care history with One Medical, including lab results, visit notes, and past message conversations. When you come in for your next appointment, your primary care provider in the office can see that you had a Video Chat and can follow up on that issue if needed.

With over 200+ offices across the U.S. and care teams available 24/7 via our apps, 1Life is what allows us to create a seamless experience for our members. We’re building something effectively unheard of in the rest of healthcare: a seamless experience for clinicians and care providers.

Connection and collaboration are built into our DNA.

In healthcare, “seamless” and “delightful” aren’t just nice to haves. We’re responsible for the well-being of hundreds of thousands of people, and making sure they feel cared for every single day matters.

We’re a team of engineers, designers, and product managers with leaders from companies like Box, Mozilla, Slack, and Salesforce, working alongside care providers and operations leaders from across the best of healthcare. We combine that vision and expertise with the perspective and experience of the One Medical employees who care for our members every day.

Collaboration between teammates, collaboration between patients and providers, and, perhaps most importantly, collaboration between each member of a patient’s care team is a lot of collaboration. Without the right tools, it can turn into complications and confusion. All of this cooperation is optimized by surfacing and sharing the right data at the right time. 1Life allows everyone to work seamlessly together to ensure the highest quality care.

Connection and collaboration let us solve really hard problems well.

While we’ve made huge progress within One Medical, we haven’t fixed healthcare yet. EHRs are still a major cause of provider burnout throughout the industry — adding further obstacles to an already massive, overwhelming system littered with complexities, friction, and dead ends. We’re leveraging technology to make that enormous, terrifying system fade into the background so all that’s left is the relationships between the people getting and giving care.

Our engineers affect the quality of people’s lives — not through an entertainment device or a socializing tool, but with services and products that enhance and improve patients’ physical and mental health, helping people feel better in every aspect of their lives. Our software’s job is to let our real product — the service of providing intimate, personal, compassionate healthcare—come to the forefront.

That’s a unique gift, but also a tremendous responsibility that’s rife with challenges: health improvements often require patient involvement, behavior change, and seamless communication with a support team. We’re all about finding new solutions to tough, knotty problems so that our clinicians can better care for people.

We’re the tech that’s actually fixing healthcare: join us.

We know that’s a big goal. We’re proud of what we’ve done so far and we’re energized by the challenges still ahead, both within One Medical and the healthcare system as a whole.

We’ve got an amazing team of providers, admins, engineers, and leaders on our team who are up to the challenge, but we know we’re going to need a lot of help. We’re growing and looking for other folks interested in finally bringing useful technology to healthcare. We’re extremely excited about the good we think we can do.

Whether you’re a patient, a fan, or you want to be part of our team, we hope you’ll join us on our mission to transform healthcare for everyone. Learn more on our careers page.