The Optum Casestudy
“The beauty of Hasura is that we can manage the data through Postgres and we can leverage the data through the APIs that are available both internally and externally. We don’t intend to have every piece of data in the clinical platform - Hasura allows us to manage the data from the database as well as from the API.”
Nagaraja Nayak
VP Enterprise Clinical Tech, Optum
About Optum
Better healthcare, globally
Minnesota-based Optum is UnitedHealth Group’s technology-focused health services business. The company’s mission is to help people live healthier lives by providing the best health services and experiences with lower costs.
Optum focuses on improving overall health system performance through market-leading information, data analytics, technology, and clinical insights.
The company serves employers, government agencies, health plans, life science companies, care providers, individuals, and families in 150 countries in North America, South America, Europe, Asia Pacific, and the Middle East.
The Problem
Optum’s Challenge
Optum’s clinical platform was extensive and sophisticated, but its monolithic structure was limiting the company’s ability to:
• Improve agility and speed up time to market
• Innovate and experiment
• Meet the needs of both large and small customers
• Avoid replication and improve reuse across business lines
• Grant the delivery team more autonomy
• Enable a leaner workforce
Using domain-driven design, Optum deconstructed the platform into more manageable pieces and settled on micro products (single page applications) as the best solution. This structure would depend heavily on the right users accessing relevant data and meaningful data insights. Optum needed modern technology to enable this.
“From the initial concept, it took just 100 days to get our new clinical platform running in a production environment, with nurses using the micro products. We don’t think we could have achieved this unbelievable speed without Hasura. We have been able to get to market much, much faster.”
Nagaraja Nayak
VP Enterprise Clinical Tech, Optum
The Solution
Why Optum chose Hasura
When assessing technologies, the Optum team quickly realised that GraphQL would help them reduce the number of versions they manage for each client need and eliminate over-fetching and under-fetching.
Optum evaluated a number of tools but chose Hasura because:
• Hasura would expose their data out of the box
• It had no under- and over-fetching problems
• It is a Back-end as a Service (BaaS)
• Hasura would speed up Optum's time to market
• It required only a lean workforce
• The technology is cloud-native
• Hasura has declarative access controls for security
• It offers a great developer experience
Implementation
Optum built the following architecture for their modernized clinical platform:
• Top-level: Pluggable products
• Middle-level: Independently deployed micro products.
• Foundation: Data as a Service, where Hasura GraphQL sits
Optum set up Hasura to manage the data and traffic within the platform, track activity, and fast-track development. GraphQL enables the micro products to work together to deliver health care solutions.
Every service in the clinical platform is backed by contextualized intelligence, and Hasura worked closely with Optum on the platform’s strict security and regulatory requirements.
The Results
The benefits of using Hasura
Hasura and GraphQL have helped Optum modernize their technology and services fast and effectively.
Optum’s developers were on board with Hasura from Day 1 and the platform now makes it easy for developers to build additional micro products, adding value to providers, physicians, and patients.
The Optum team is seeing the benefits of putting their strategy into action through increased patient satisfaction, higher quality outcomes at lower costs, and more collaboration across the ecosystem.
