Microservices in Healthcare — Modular Architecture for Hospital Systems

What Are Microservices in Healthcare?

Microservices in healthcare refer to a software architecture pattern where a hospital system is decomposed into independent, specialized modules, each responsible for a specific business function (organizations, commercial management, logistics, laboratory, imaging, business intelligence). Unlike traditional monolithic applications — where a single codebase handles all the logic — each microservice is developed, deployed, and scaled independently.

Complementarily, microfrontends apply the same principle to the user interface layer: each module has its own web interface, hosted independently, that loads only when the user needs it. This combination makes it possible to build 100% web-based healthcare ecosystems that are accessible from any location and updatable without service interruption.

Why It Matters in Healthcare

Healthcare facilities operate complex and diverse workflows: billing, supply logistics, diagnostic imaging, laboratory, and patient and physician portals. A microservices architecture allows these workflows to coexist without depending on one another, delivering:

• Modular independence: each service (MS Organizations, MS Commercial, MS Logistics, MS LIS, MS PACS, MS Business Intelligence) operates autonomously. An update to the laboratory module does not affect billing.
• High availability: through load balancers (Application Load Balancer) and API Gateways, requests are distributed to prevent overload, ensuring responsive performance even during peak hours.
• Perimeter security: protection layers such as AWS WAF and Amazon CloudFront provide fast content distribution and threat mitigation, with a dedicated web application firewall.
• Horizontal scalability: only the modules that require it can be scaled (for example, the LIS during a mass health campaign) without over-provisioning the rest of the infrastructure.
• Centralized data (Single Source of Truth): although services are independent, they all share a centralized database (Amazon RDS Multi-AZ), eliminating duplicate records.
• Zero-downtime updates: each microfrontend and microservice is updated independently, with no need to take down the entire system.

How Davix Relates to Microservices in Healthcare

The Davix architecture is built entirely on cloud-native microservices and microfrontends (AWS). Its capabilities include:

• Specialized, independent modules: MS Organizations, MS Commercial, MS Logistics, MS LIS, MS PACS, and MS Business Intelligence — all interconnected through an API Gateway.
• AWS infrastructure with CloudFront CDN for global distribution, WAF for security, ALB for load balancing, and RDS Multi-AZ as the single source of data.
• User interfaces (ERP UI, Patient UI, Physician UI) hosted as microfrontends on S3, loading only what each user needs.
• Proven capacity for over 255 concurrent users distributed across more than 34 sites.
• Infrastructure-agnostic design: while optimized for AWS, it can be extended to Azure, Google Cloud, or a private cloud.

Microservices architecture is not an isolated technical decision — it is the foundation that allows a healthcare system to grow, adapt, and evolve without compromising service continuity.