The healthcare industry is at the forefront of leveraging massive amounts and types of data to enhance patient outcomes, streamline operations, and power healthcare innovations. Yet, data and API architects in this space face formidable challenges in designing platforms that meet the stringent requirements of this regulated space.

In this blog, we’ll diagnose the key issues plaguing healthcare data platforms and explore how Hasura’s Data Delivery Network (DDN) provides a remedy.

The challenge: Managing data in a sensitive and regulated environment

Healthcare data includes Personally Identifiable Information (PII) and Protected Health Information (PHI), making data security paramount. Compared to other industries, copying or moving data freely is not an option due to strict compliance rules. Developers are forced to build APIs where the data resides, often requiring federated data architectures. This approach ensures compliance but increases the complexity of managing APIs and ensuring seamless data access.

Building patient-centric applications, such as decision support systems and telehealth platforms, requires a unified view of data scattered across multiple systems. Without a centralized semantic layer, this becomes a monumental task. Solutions must support both self-hosted deployments for organizations prioritizing complete control and managed services for those seeking convenience without sacrificing compliance.

Developing secure APIs in healthcare requires robust governance frameworks, granular access controls, and real-time monitoring. These requirements slow down innovation as teams navigate complex security configurations and ensure compliance with regulations such as HIPAA, SOC 2 Type II, GDPR, and ISO standards.

Let’s analyze a few real-world use cases in healthcare to see how these challenges play out.

• Patient and member 360: Delivering holistic patient views requires data aggregation across disparate systems – electronic health records, claims data, and IoT devices. APIs must support real-time queries, assuring that PII/PHI remains secure and compliant with healthcare standards.
• Telehealth and virtual care: In the post-COVID world patients expect seamless virtual consultations. This demands APIs capable of delivering secure, real-time data for interactive telehealth experiences while maintaining the integrity of sensitive information.
• Infrastructure modernization: As healthcare organizations transition to public clouds, they must reconcile new and legacy systems without disrupting critical operations. Hybrid supergraph architectures that unify these data sources are essential to ensure a smooth migration.
• AI-driven productivity: Large Language Models (LLMs) promise to revolutionize healthcare productivity but require secure, federated access to sensitive data. Without unfettered access to data and governance controls in place, AI-driven solutions cannot reliably deliver on their full potential.

What’s common to all these use cases are the following requirements:

• Unify, integrate, and aggregate data
• Accessible and secure composite data
• Deployment and management flexibility of this middleware
• Leveraging all the above to ground AI in the reality of enterprise data

The Hasura blueprint: A unified data access layer for healthcare

Hasura’s Data Delivery Network (DDN) addresses these constraints head-on, providing a secure, compliant, and developer-friendly solution for healthcare data platforms.

At its core, Hasura lets you unlock the power of your data by seamlessly activating it in a universal semantic layer, tailored for all your applications. Whether your data resides in databases, APIs, cloud data warehouses, or even files, Hasura DDN ensures quick, secure, and effortless integration.

With support for multiple API output formats, including GraphQL, REST, RPCs, and JDBC, you can build scalable, high-performance applications while leveraging Hasura DDN’s flexibility to interact with your data however you need.

Whether you require full control over your infrastructure or prefer a safe, fully managed service, Hasura DDN offers deployment options that cater to diverse needs:

• Fully self-hosted deployment: Hasura is available as a containerized solution that allows you to maintain complete data control within your environment – ideal for organizations with uber-strict compliance requirements (and internal architectural or sourcing policies). We are also working on non-containerized packaging to aid engineering teams that have yet to adopt container technologies.
• HIPAA and SoC II compliant managed services: You can offload the entire infrastructure management to Hasura Cloud without sacrificing compliance.
• Hybrid, BYOC (Cloud): This is the best of both worlds – bring your infrastructure and we’ll manage it for you.

Hasura DDN is built with security as its cornerstone, enabling healthcare organizations to meet stringent regulatory demands while empowering developers.

Advanced security features

• Granular access controls: Define fine-grained permissions down to the row and column level, ensuring sensitive data is accessible only to authorized users.
• API rate limiting: Protect against denial-of-service attacks while maintaining performance.
• Seamless authentication: Integrate with your existing identity providers for secure API access.

Comprehensive observability
Hasura DDN delivers 100% data-use transparency through built-in telemetry and logging, ensuring visibility across your API infrastructure.

Governance without compromise
Enable secure data access, enforce data contracts, and manage access control policies centrally. With Hasura DDN, you can streamline governance while retaining flexibility.

Read more here.

Hasura’s managed service and its compliance credentials make it a trusted partner for healthcare organizations navigating complex regulatory landscapes:

• HIPAA: Ensures secure handling of PHI.
• SOC 2 Type II: Demonstrates operational excellence in data security.
• GDPR and ISO Certifications: Guarantees compliance with global standards.

These credentials, combined with continuous vulnerability scanning of component images and regular penetration testing, provide unparalleled assurance to healthcare teams. Read more here.

Turns out, the same principles that drive efficiency in building data API platforms also create the perfect substrate for AI to securely and scalably access enterprise data.

Hasura’s metadata-driven approach lays the foundation for PromptQL, a data access agent that facilitates this exchange of information between an LLM and your data. PromptQL brings to the table the following properties that are critical in helping with the adoption of  AI applications connected to business data:

• Transparency: See and understand how AI makes decisions.
• Steerability: Guide and control AI behavior.
• Verifiability: Confirm the accuracy and reliability of AI outputs.
• Repeatability: Consistently reproduce AI results

Read more about Hasura DDN’s GenAI support here.

User stories: Hasura DDN’s real-world impact on healthcare

Hasura not only simplifies data management but also supercharges developer efficiency, enabling teams to focus on innovation. Here are some real-life stories about innovative engineering teams that trust Hasura to make their lives easier:

Philips Healthcare
By adopting Hasura, Philips accelerated development timelines from 2–4 years to under one year in a highly regulated environment.

If we had gone the traditional way this process would have taken us 2-4 years. With Hasura we have been able to crunch it to just under a year. Achieving this timeframe in a highly regulated environment like healthcare is phenomenal. – Karthik Srinivasan, Solution Architect, Philips Healthcare

Henry Meds
Henry reduced API development efforts by 40%, allowing its team to focus on building patient-centric solutions.

With Hasura, once you've figured out your domain data models, you get your API for free. Whether it's filtering or joining or sorting, or even really advanced features like live queries, Hasura provides it out of the box. – Nathaniel Armer, CTO and Founder, Henry

Fortune 5 Healthcare Enterprise
With Hasura, a Fortune 5 company empowered 1,200 developers to ship faster by leveraging a unified data access layer.

We couldn’t have achieved this unbelievable speed without Hasura. We have been able to get to market much, much faster. –Nagaraja Nayak, VP of Enterprise Clinical Tech

Building the future of healthcare data platforms

In a space where security, compliance, and flexibility are paramount, Hasura offers a robust blueprint for building modern data platforms. By addressing key constraints – secure data access, federated architectures, and developer productivity – Hasura empowers healthcare teams to deliver next-gen applications and experiences.

Whether you’re modernizing your infrastructure, enabling telehealth, or building AI-driven solutions, Hasura DDN ensures your platform is ready to meet the data challenges of today and tomorrow.

Related resources

https://hasura.io/healthcare

https://hasura.io/blog/api-automation-in-healthcare-with-hasura

https://hasura.io/blog/building-brave-care-using-hasura-case-study-of-a-yc-backed-healthcare-startup