Case Study: UCLA Health achieves advanced pathology case search and streamlined healthcare research with Elastic

Streamlining Healthcare and Research The Story of Elasticsearch at UCLA Health

UCLA Health, a large academic health system with multiple hospitals and hundreds of outpatient practices, needed a way to perform advanced searches across pathology cases after consolidating many legacy systems into Epic CareConnect. Although the EMR centralized data, it lacked the text- and case-level search capabilities required for QA/QC, College of American Pathology (CAP) inspections, clinical trials and routine clinician and lab workflows.

The team built a custom Case Search application powered by Elasticsearch and tightly integrated with Epic, deploying a multi-node cluster and using features like fuzzy search, autocomplete, synonym tokenizers, nested objects, and multi-field queries. The solution gave clinicians and lab technicians fast, Google-like searching of structured and unstructured pathology data, supported inspections and trials, and created a scalable search platform for other use cases—along with operational lessons (heap sizing, cert formats, deployment practices) to improve reliability and performance.

UCLA Health

Vivek Katakwar

Analytics Application Developer