Case study

How Philips Healthcare accelerated development by up to 4X with Hasura

Philips Healthcare is part of the Fortune 500 company Philips and is dedicated to advancing healthcare by connecting people, technology, and data. Their Radiology Operations Command Centre project is a response to the need for optimized radiology services, high-quality imaging, better diagnostics, and improved patient care.

Key metrics

50% reduction in team size per project

Commercial release in under 1 year

2-4x faster development

In conversation with

Karthik Srinivasan

Solution Architect, Philips Healthcare

About Philips Healthcare

Better healthcare, enabled by technology

Philips Healthcare creates innovative products and services that improve the lives of staff and patients around the world. Their healthcare innovations increase hospital patient and staff satisfaction while decreasing inefficiencies.

The company considers how technology can improve the lives of consumers, patients, providers and caregivers across the health continuum from healthy living and prevention to diagnosis, treatment and home care. Philips Healthcare’s innovative solutions enable better care at lower cost.

The Problem

Philips Healthcare’s Challenge

After researching the needs of hospital-based radiology departments, Philips Healthcare conceptualized its Radiology Operations Command Centre. This flexible, customizable Platform as a Service optimizes operations, increases efficiency, and improves patient care.

The challenges it addresses include:

Minimizing scanning errors, to reduce patient re-exposure
High-quality scanning and imaging access for accurate diagnostics
Enabling consistent adherence to standardized protocols
Remote supervision and support
Optimal allocation and scheduling of imaging resources
An open but secure API to let developers create value-added services

The big challenge would be to adapt the existing information model to improve all parts of the ecosystem - while complying with the industry’s strict regulatory requirements.

The Solution

Why Philips Healthcare chose Hasura

When setting up the central data access infrastructure for the platform, Philips Healthcare had to consider the operational context, tech stack, available internal skills, time to market, regulatory requirements, scalability and cost.

The team quickly settled on GraphQL and initially considered developing their own GraphQL APIs from scratch, but decided against this due to a lack of in-house expertise.

Instead, Philips Healthcare chose Hasura because:

Hasura has extensive support for Postgres
Hasura would plug and play with their existing on-premises database
Getting started is extremely easy
Hasura offered excellent performance
For most use cases, there’s no need to write and maintain back-end code

“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

The Results

The benefits of using Hasura

Bringing Hasura on board for their GraphQL implementation has helped Philips Healthcare achieve milestones impressively fast:

2-3 months to concept validation with a lean team
6 months to pilot launch and pre-market evaluation
< 12 months to commercial release

Philips Healthcare is now able to:

Integrate external data from radiology workflow events, recommendations, serviceability events and partner ecosystems
Provide simplified, app-specific schemes for front-end apps
Manage and monitor everything via the Hasura Pro Management Console
Support flexible authorization models for different data access use cases
Link custom authorization models to the Philips Authorization Server
Consolidate all domain data, transactional data and analytics into a central information hub
Allow developers to build client applications easily
Scale to handle large user bases and data volumes

Closing Note

What’s Next for Philips Healthcare

Philips Healthcare is currently working with Hasura to baseline and scale up their GraphQL performance. They’re also planning to use Hasura to boost dev team productivity and feature velocity across other business lines.