Case Study: HealthUnlocked achieves a scalable, language‑agnostic global social health graph with Neo Technology

Health Care Social Network Using Graph Database

HealthUnlocked, founded in London in 2009, runs the world’s first global social health graph—over 400 charity- and organization-run communities serving about 1.5 million users a month. As traffic surged, the original platform began to hit performance limits and suffer outages; the team needed a scalable, language-agnostic way to extract meaning from millions of free-text posts and build an ontology linking symptoms, conditions and treatments.

HealthUnlocked rebuilt the platform on Neo4j, creating language‑agnostic concept nodes and dictionaries that relate user comments to clinical entities; the first phase was modeled and launched in 2 months and full production deployed in 4 months. The result is a high-speed, scalable system (initial production ~1M nodes and >9M relationships) that improves contextual search and recommendations, supports multi-language expansion, and provides a flexible schema for future features.

HealthUnlocked