Case Study: athenahealth improves real-time patient safety with Apollo GraphQL

athenahealth reaches 250 million operations in a year with Apollo GraphQL

athenahealth, a provider of clinical software used by over 20,000 medical practices, faced a critical challenge with its legacy data broker system. This system could not support real-time data synchronization, creating a life-or-death risk where a patient's allergy update might not be seen by all clinicians. To modernize safely without disrupting their 25-year-old production system, they turned to Apollo GraphQL.

By implementing Apollo GraphQL with a "steel thread" approach, athenahealth introduced a new React micro-frontend powered by Apollo Client and Apollo Server. This solution used GraphQL subscriptions to enable real-time updates, proving its safety with synchronization times under one second. The results were dramatic, with Apollo GraphQL operations growing from 200,000 per month to 75 million in seven months and then to ~250 million within a year, forming a new foundation for real-time patient care.

athenahealth