Clinicians That Code
The Handover

The Clinicians That Code briefing

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Issue 1 · Friday 7 August 2026

This week: the UK regulator opens a sandbox, hackathon momentum keeps building, and eight clinician-shipped builds (three of them by nurses).

Top signal

The MHRA opens a regulatory sandbox for AI medical devices. The UK regulator is convening AI device makers, NHS organisations and regulatory experts to explore safe real-world deployment, and clinician-builders are eligible to apply as manufacturers. Read it as a sign of where things are heading: even the regulator now builds safe places to experiment. Expressions of interest are open. gov.uk

Shipped this week

  • Open Vent Sim: Italian and Czech anaesthetists built a browser-based mechanical ventilation simulator in roughly 40 hours with Google AI Studio, then validated it in formal anaesthesia and critical care training. Publication
  • Moya Healthwent live on the App Store: doctor-turned-founder Wiktoria Milczynska's solo-built chronic care app. X
  • Critical Care Vault: a cardiovascular ICU nurse spent the better part of a year building a bedside reference and reasoning app (haemodynamics, rhythms, vents, vasopressors, labs, ABGs); now free in the App Store, no ads. Reddit
  • DentVault: a dentist (and past Claude Code competition winner) shipped a patient and clinic management app built over his weekends. Reddit
  • SNOMED CT toolchain: Marcus Baw, GP and clinical informatician, keeps modernising his Rust-based local-first terminology toolchain; the most-seen signal in our pipeline this week. GitHub
  • MLOps healthcare pipeline: critical care nurse Mogaka Hezron published a production-ready pipeline for versioning, deploying and monitoring healthcare ML models (Docker, MLflow, DVC, FastAPI, Kubernetes). GitHub
  • MMEasy: Dr Zachary Meade built a free opioid conversion calculator out of frustration with doing the maths on scrap tape during residency. X
  • Coeur Cosmique: a nurse who drives between patients all day shipped an iOS app with Claude Code, noting that domain knowledge, not coding skill, is now the scarce part. X

Build safely

  • Ambient scribes are not medical devices, the MHRA has confirmed; Dr Keith Grimes unpacks the ruling and the quietly revised NHS supplier registry rules that shift assurance burdens onto buyers. Curistica Issue 60
  • From vibe-coded prototype to compliant production: a practical playbook on migrating a Base44 build to a HIPAA-compliant stack (BAA-covered database, encryption, audit logs, access controls). Vendor-authored, so read with that in mind; the checklist itself is sound. VertiComply
  • The FTC sues Hims & Hers over condition-level health data shared with ad platforms; Kevin Maloy MD reframes the complaint as a compliance audit checklist for anyone running a DTC telehealth stack. FTC
  • One vendor, 425,000 patients exposed: a single practice-management vendor breach spanned many unrelated provider organisations; concentration risk is part of the build-versus-buy calculus. Becker's
  • A cautionary tale: a patient reports their doctor's startup EMR was a vibe-coded app whose database a layman could expose. Building is the easy 10%; this column exists for the other 90%. X

Tools & guides

  • A secure UI for AI portal-message evaluation: a clinician-authored JMIR tutorial (Brian Hasselfeld MD, Johns Hopkins) on building a preclinical interface for evaluating LLMs that draft patient portal replies. JMIR
  • OAuth 2.1 + MCP for FHIR data: the token-handling details that separate a sandbox demo from production PHI (BAA, scoped tokens, audit trail). PropelAuth
  • book-to-skill: convert clinical guideline PDFs into Agent Skills so a 200-page document costs tokens proportional to the question, not the page count; recommended by Kevin Maloy MD. GitHub
  • Capture the Refusal: internist Doug Fullington proposes a four-part data model for the moment clinicians overrule the guideline answer; charts record the world after a decision, never the decision itself. Substack

Events

  • 27 Aug (online): SIIM webinar "The Future Is Prompted: Vibe Coding for Healthcare Apps", led by radiologist Ali Tejani MD (UCSF). SIIM
  • 18 Sep (London): Adeline Health x AI Hackathon at Google HQ; prototype European healthcare AI on MedGemma, £13,000 in prizes. Applications close 21 August. Adeline
  • 3 Oct (Antwerp): Care & Code Clinical Build Day; doctors, nurses, pharmacists and physiotherapists vibe-code a working AI care tool in one day. Disclosure: this is our own event. careandcode.be
  • Recently: the Abridge x Anthropic x Lightspeed hackathon drew 768 applications, 199 participants and 113 projects in 12 hours, and YC co-hosted an agentic healthcare hackathon with Medplum. The momentum is not slowing down.

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