Case Study: HealthUnlocked achieves a high-speed, language-agnostic global social health graph with Neo4j

Health Care Social Network Using Graph Database

HealthUnlocked is a London-based social health network (founded 2009) that hosts over 400 charity- and organization-run communities and serves more than 1.5 million users a month. As traffic and user-generated content grew, the legacy platform began to hit capacity limits and experience 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 its knowledge platform on Neo4j, creating language‑agnostic “concept” nodes and loading large dictionaries to relate symptoms, conditions and treatments to user comments. The new graph model was prototyped and launched in two months and fully deployed in four, delivering high-speed, scalable performance (millions of nodes and relationships), a flexible schema for future features, and improved user experience across multiple countries and languages.

HealthUnlocked

Adam Neilson

CTO, Manages