NextGen data persistence pattern in healthcare: Polyglot persistence

Databases are the “Backbone” of Hospital Information Systems. The storage of transactional data, session information, Multi Modal data storage and retrieval, traversing graph of treatments the patient has undergone and specialist doctors they visited are essentially different problems. Different databases are designed to overcome different storage problems. Using a single database engine for all of the requirements usually leads to non-performant solutions [1]. Many online healthcare enterprises tend to use the same database engine to store business transactions, session management data, and for other storage needs such as reporting, BI, data warehousing, Multi Modal data or logging information, as is typical case with online hospital and clinical information management systems. The user sessions, patient registration details, recommendations by doctors, appointments registered, billing information, maintenance or inventory order data do not need the same properties of availability, consistency, or backup requirements. Does session management storage need the same rigorous backup/recovery strategy as the multi modal medical data backup or patient medical data? One-database-fits-all is no more the de facto choice for web applications [4]. The need of situation is to adopt for notion of polyglot persistence. Basic idea behind polyglot persistence is to use specialized databases (both NoSQL and Relational in combination) depending upon the performance parameters required by different healthcare related information within the same healthcare web application. Our proposed architecture provides a solution to augment the access to such disparate data stores using the concept of polyglot persistence. In this paper, we provide a prototype implementation of polyglot persistence applied to healthcare Information Systems as a proof-of-concept.