If you've been waiting for your EHR to build that one feature you desperately need, you're not alone. Most doctors have experienced the frustration of watching their EHR vendor overpromise and underdeliver, year after year.
But something interesting is happening right now in private practices across the country. Doctors are taking matters into their own hands and building their own solutions using some of the early consumer vibe coding platforms.
What Exactly Is Vibe Coding?
Think of vibe coding as the difference between sending a text message and programming a phone. You don't need to understand how the phone works to send a text. That's vibe coding for software development.
Traditional AI code development tools are built for engineers. They require you to understand terminals, repositories, GitHub, and a whole technical vocabulary that feels like a foreign language. Tell a doctor to "access this via terminal" and you'll get blank stares.
Vibe coding flips this model. Instead of needing technical knowledge, you describe what you want in plain language and the AI builds it for you. It's called "one-shot" development because you enter a single prompt and get a complete output. No coding experience required.
Why Doctors Are Jumping In
The shift started with curiosity but it's being fueled by frustration. Doctors have been promised solutions for years. They've been told their EHR will eventually add the features they need to run their practice more efficiently. And they're tired of waiting.
Now, with consumer-friendly platforms like Lovable, Cursor, and others, any non-technical person can create something. The same way you might use AI to generate an image or video, you can now use it to build apps, dashboards, or patient portal features.
For doctors, this feels like freedom. Finally, you're in the driver's seat.
What Doctors Are Actually Building
The projects we're seeing are genuinely exciting. Some might seem simple on the surface, but they're solving real problems:
Custom Dashboards: Imagine consolidating all the patient data you need onto one screen instead of clicking through multiple tabs. When your patient is sitting in front of you, every second of attention matters. These dashboards let you focus on care, not navigation.
Better Patient Portals: This is where the biggest opportunity exists. You know your patients better than any software company ever could. You understand what they struggle with, what information they need, and how they prefer to communicate. With vibe coding, you can customize the portal experience specifically for your patient population.
The advice for any tech startup is simple: talk to your customers. As a doctor, you're already doing that every single day. You know what your patients need. Now you can actually build it for them.
The Problem with Going It Alone
Here's where things get tricky. While vibe coding sounds perfect, there's a catch when doctors use consumer platforms.
The Compliance Issue: Consumer vibe coding platforms aren't built for healthcare. They're designed for anyone to use, whether you're a plumber, a teacher, or a kid in college. That means they're not HIPAA compliant. The moment you start using patient data with these tools, you're taking on serious risk.
The Integration Gap: Let's say you successfully build something amazing on a consumer platform. Great! But now what? It lives completely outside your EHR. You've just created another fragmented third-party tool. The very thing you've been complaining about with other software vendors.
If you can't integrate it with your actual patient data, it's just a prototype. And prototypes don't help you run your practice.
The Deployment Problem: Even if you build something that looks perfect on your screen, getting it deployed and usable for your staff and patients is a completely different challenge. This is where many doctors hit a wall.
Why Hiring an Engineer Isn't the Answer
You might be thinking: "Fine, I'll just hire an engineer to help me build this properly." Unfortunately, it's not that simple.
The biggest barrier isn't cost, though engineers are expensive. The real problem is evaluation. How do you know if an engineer is actually good at what they do? If you're not technical yourself, it's incredibly hard to tell.
Many doctors have tried platforms like Fiverr or Upwork. They find someone with the right credentials, pay them, and watch as progress seems to happen. The engineer shows you prototypes on their computer. Things look promising. You keep paying.
But here's what often happens: the engineer can make things work on their local machine (their own computer) that they can never actually deploy to production. They're cobbling together libraries, googling solutions, and creating what looks like progress. But when it comes time to actually launch what you've built, it falls apart.
Why AI slop isn't unique to AI-generated code. Engineers have been building sloppy, unusable code for years. The difference is that a truly exceptional engineer (what people call a "10x engineer") knows how to build something that actually works in the real world. Those engineers are rare and expensive, and certainly most doctors or practice could never afford.
The Employee vs. Self-Employed Reality
Your situation looks different depending on your practice setup.
If You're Employed: You're restricted by whatever systems your employer chooses. You have zero say in what technology you use. You might build things out of curiosity, but you'll never get access to actual EHR data. Some doctors use clinical decision tools on their personal phones, but this creates major liability issues.
Quick tip: If you're going to experiment with tools on your phone for patient care, at least use a separate device. Your personal phone could become evidence in a legal case, and you don't want lawyers going through your photos, videos, and messages.
If You're in Private Practice: You have more freedom but the same compliance risks. You can choose your level of liability, which makes you more willing to experiment. But remember: just because something is easier for you doesn't mean it's better for your patients.
If your patients have to juggle multiple systems, remember multiple passwords, and click through several apps just because it makes your workflow smoother, you've created a terrible user experience. In healthcare, you can't just think about solving your own problems. You have to think about your patients too.
What Cline Is Building
This is exactly why we created Cline. We're building what we call ""the doctor's technical co-founder."
Cline is an EHR-native vibe coding platform. That means you get all the simplicity and power of vibe coding, but built directly into a mature, secure, scalable EHR system. You're not creating prototypes that live outside your workflow. You're building real tools that integrate with your actual patient data, compliantly.
Our partnership with Ease makes this possible. Ease provides the proven EHR infrastructure that's been tested in the market for years. Cline adds the ability for you to build custom solutions on top of that foundation.
You get to be the builder. You understand your practice better than anyone. You know what your patients need. Now you can actually create solutions that work for both of you, without the compliance headaches or integration nightmares.
The Bigger Picture
What we're really talking about is empowerment. For too long, doctors have been at the mercy of software vendors who don't understand the realities of running a practice. You've had to work with whatever tools you're given, even when they don't fit your needs.
Vibe coding represents a fundamental shift. For the first time, you don't need to be technical to build technical solutions. You don't need to hire expensive engineers who may or may not deliver. You don't need to wait years for your EHR vendor to maybe add a feature.
You can take control of your own technology stack. You can customize your practice management tools. You can build better patient experiences that actually serve your specific patient population.
The technology has finally caught up with what doctors have needed all along: the ability to customize their tools without becoming engineers themselves.
Ready to Learn More?
If you're tired of waiting for your EHR to catch up with your needs, or if you've been experimenting with vibe coding and hitting walls around compliance and deployment, we'd love to show you what's possible with Cline.
We're helping doctors become builders. Not because you need to learn how to code, but because you already know how to care for your patients. Now you can build technology that matches that expertise.
Cline is currently in beta. Contact us at practice@withcline.com to learn more about EHR-native vibe coding.