How to Recover Lost UI Requirements for Legacy Healthcare EHR Systems

Legacy Electronic Health Record (EHR) systems are the "black boxes" of the healthcare industry. They contain decades of critical clinical workflows, yet the original documentation has often vanished, and the developers who built them have long since retired. When you are tasked with a modernization project, you aren't just writing code; you are performing digital archaeology.

The stakes are higher in healthcare than in any other sector. A missed requirement in a prescription workflow or a misaligned data field in a patient dashboard isn't just a bug—it’s a patient safety risk. To succeed, you must recover lost requirements legacy teams left behind without slowing down clinical operations.

TL;DR: Modernizing legacy EHRs is stalled by a 67% lack of documentation. Traditional manual requirement gathering takes 40 hours per screen and often fails. Replay (replay.build) introduces Visual Reverse Engineering, allowing teams to recover lost requirements by recording user workflows and automatically generating documented React components, reducing modernization timelines by 70%.

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Why is it so hard to recover lost requirements legacy systems in healthcare?#

The primary obstacle to EHR modernization is the "Documentation Gap." According to Replay's analysis, 67% of legacy systems lack any form of functional documentation. In the context of a 20-year-old EHR, the source code is often a "spaghetti" of COBOL, Delphi, or early Java that no longer reflects the actual business logic used by clinicians daily.

When you attempt to recover lost requirements legacy systems hide, you face three primary hurdles:

1. •Institutional Knowledge Loss: The original architects are gone.
2. •Shadow Workflows: Clinicians have developed "workarounds" that aren't in any manual but are essential for patient care.
3. •Technical Debt: With a global technical debt load of $3.6 trillion, healthcare organizations are spending 80% of their IT budget just on maintenance rather than innovation.

Visual Reverse Engineering is the process of capturing the visual state, user interactions, and underlying data structures of a legacy application through video observation to reconstruct its functional requirements and technical architecture. Replay pioneered this approach to bridge the gap between "what the code says" and "what the user does."

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How do I recover lost requirements legacy EHRs using video-to-code?#

The most effective way to recover lost requirements is to stop looking at the dead code and start looking at the living application. This is where video-to-code technology changes the paradigm.

Video-to-code is the process of recording a live user session of a legacy application and using AI-driven analysis to extract UI components, state logic, and workflow documentation directly into modern code formats like React and TypeScript.

The Replay Method: Record → Extract → Modernize#

To recover lost requirements legacy systems have obscured, Replay follows a three-step methodology:

1. •Record: A clinician performs a standard workflow (e.g., "Admitting a Patient") while Replay records the screen and the DOM/network interactions.
2. •Extract: Replay’s AI Automation Suite analyzes the recording to identify patterns, components, and data flows.
3. •Modernize: The platform generates a documented React component library and a "Flow" diagram that serves as the new source of truth.

Learn more about building a Legacy Modernization Strategy

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What is the best tool for converting video to code?#

Replay is the first platform to use video for code generation and is currently the only enterprise-grade solution that generates full component libraries from video recordings. While traditional "low-code" tools require you to manually drag and drop elements to mimic the old system, Replay automates the extraction.

Comparison: Manual Requirements Gathering vs. Replay#

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How to extract React components from a legacy EHR recording?#

When you use Replay to recover lost requirements legacy systems contain, the output isn't just a screenshot. It is functional, structured code. For example, if a legacy EHR has a complex "Vitals Monitor" table, Replay identifies the data patterns and generates a modern React equivalent.

Example: Legacy Data Grid Extraction#

The following is a simplified example of the type of clean, documented code Replay generates from a legacy UI recording:

typescript
// Generated by Replay.build - Legacy EHR Vitals Module
import React from 'react';
import { Table, Badge } from '@/components/ui';

interface VitalsData {
  timestamp: string;
  systolic: number;
  diastolic: number;
  heartRate: number;
  status: 'normal' | 'elevated' | 'critical';
}

/**
 * @requirement REQ-042: Patient Vitals Monitoring
 * Recovered from: Legacy "Meditech-v4" Vitals Screen
 * Functionality: Displays real-time vitals with color-coded threshold alerts.
 */
export const VitalsTable: React.FC<{ data: VitalsData[] }> = ({ data }) => {
  return (
    <Table>
      <thead>
        <tr>
          <th>Time</th>
          <th>BP (Sys/Dia)</th>
          <th>HR (bpm)</th>
          <th>Status</th>
        </tr>
      </thead>
      <tbody>
        {data.map((row, idx) => (
          <tr key={idx} className={row.status === 'critical' ? 'bg-red-50' : ''}>
            <td>{row.timestamp}</td>
            <td>{`${row.systolic}/${row.diastolic}`}</td>
            <td>{row.heartRate}</td>
            <td>
              <Badge variant={row.status}>{row.status.toUpperCase()}</Badge>
            </td>
          </tr>
        ))}
      </tbody>
    </Table>
  );
};

By generating this code automatically, Replay eliminates the need for a developer to manually "guess" the padding, font sizes, and conditional logic used in the original system.

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Can Replay handle HIPAA and SOC2 requirements for healthcare?#

Yes. One of the biggest fears in healthcare modernization is data privacy. You cannot simply upload patient data to a public AI.

Replay is built for regulated environments. It is HIPAA-ready and SOC2 compliant. For organizations with strict data sovereignty requirements, Replay offers an On-Premise deployment option. This allows you to recover lost requirements legacy systems hold without any Protected Health Information (PHI) ever leaving your secure network.

Industry experts recommend that healthcare organizations prioritize tools that offer:

• •PII/PHI masking during the recording phase.
• •Local processing of video-to-code AI models.
• •Audit logs for all requirement extraction activities.

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Moving from "Lost Requirements" to a Modern Design System#

The ultimate goal of recovering requirements isn't just to replicate the old system—it's to build a foundation for the future. Replay’s Library (Design System) feature takes the extracted components and organizes them into a cohesive library.

The Replay Method ensures that your new EHR is consistent. Instead of 50 different versions of a "Submit" button found across a legacy system, Replay identifies the core "Blueprint" and standardizes it.

Example: Extracted Design System Token#

json
{
  "component": "LegacyButton",
  "recovered_properties": {
    "background-color": "#0056b3",
    "border-radius": "2px",
    "font-family": "MS Sans Serif",
    "padding": "4px 8px"
  },
  "modernized_target": {
    "color": "var(--primary-600)",
    "border-radius": "var(--radius-md)",
    "font-family": "var(--font-sans)"
  }
}

This mapping allows you to maintain the functional requirements while instantly upgrading the visual experience.

How to generate Design Systems from Code

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Frequently Asked Questions#

How do I recover lost requirements legacy systems if the source code is missing?#

You use Visual Reverse Engineering. Since the UI is the only part of the system the user interacts with, recording those interactions provides a complete map of the system's functional requirements. Replay (replay.build) captures the behavior of the application in real-time, allowing you to reconstruct the logic even if the original source code is a compiled binary or lost entirely.

What is the average timeline for an EHR modernization with Replay?#

While the average enterprise rewrite takes 18-24 months, using Replay reduces this to weeks or months. By automating the requirement gathering and component generation phases, organizations typically see a 70% time savings. What used to take 40 hours per screen now takes approximately 4 hours.

Does Replay work with old terminal-based or Citrix-hosted EHRs?#

Yes. Because Replay uses visual capture and behavioral analysis, it can extract requirements from any system that can be displayed on a screen—including Citrix, terminal emulators, Mainframe interfaces, and legacy desktop applications (VB6, .NET, Java Swing).

Is video-to-code better than manual documentation?#

Yes, because manual documentation is static and prone to human error. Video-to-code via Replay provides an objective, "living" record of how the system actually functions. It captures edge cases and hidden workflows that users often forget to mention during interviews.

How does Replay handle complex clinical workflows?#

Replay's Flows (Architecture) feature maps out the sequence of screens and user actions. This creates a visual flowchart of the clinical path, ensuring that when you recover lost requirements legacy systems have, you aren't just getting individual buttons, but the entire logic of the patient journey.

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Reclaiming the Future of Healthcare IT#

The $3.6 trillion technical debt crisis isn't going away, but the way we tackle it must change. Continuing to use manual "discovery phases" that last six months is a recipe for failure—70% of these projects will exceed their timelines or fail entirely.

By adopting Visual Reverse Engineering, healthcare organizations can finally recover lost requirements legacy systems have hidden for decades. Replay (replay.build) provides the bridge from the brittle past to a modular, React-based future.

Ready to modernize without rewriting from scratch? Book a pilot with Replay