Hi folks, I'm exploring an idea in the health tech space and came upon Medplum as a promising option with its Typescript SDK for CRUD operation on FHIR resources. The documentation so far has been helpful; I had a few questions (a bit engineering focused) if someone has time to help out: 1. My goal is to store the FHIR data in a Postgres database I own via Supabase. I was looking into the self hosted option but it seems like there is a reliance on either running Postgres locally or using an AWS offering. What is the recommended path here? 2. When creating the MedplumClient, is it possible to connect directly to a Postgres server? My read of this is a no since it needs to connect to a FHIR server 3. I was looking at the self hosting option, but it seems like overkill since I don't really need to self host the whole Medplum application. I just need the FHIR api endpoint; is there a lightweight way of doing this with just a link to a Postgres db with creds? 4. Where does the parsing from a raw Postgres query response happen in the code? I've been searching the medplum repo but haven't seen it yet

Hi Uzair! So a lot of teams think adding "a simple FHIR Shim" on top of their data model is what they want to do. We rarely see that working in practice. FHIR is a very in-depth spec, with a lot of features including auth, complex search semantics, use of code systems and more. Medplum Client does need to connecto to a FHIR server. If you are really serious about using FHIR, Medplum is not overkill in our opinion. Read this to learn about the tables: https://www.medplum.com/docs/contributing/search-architecture

Thanks @reshma really appreciate the insights here! My understanding of this is much better after spending more time with the codebase; your answer helped a lot too! Do you know if it's possible to use the MedplumClient with a different FHIR server like what Google Cloud's Healthcare API offers? I saw the example of using the Medplum Client with Epic, it would be great to know if others like the cloud offerings through AWS/GCloud/Azure work too