Designing Microservices for Emergency Healthcare
Lessons learned from building a microservices architecture for emergency ambulance dispatch and patient records management.
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Why microservices for emergency healthcare?
Emergency healthcare systems demand reliability, low latency, and fault tolerance. When building the EMRO Ambulance platform, I chose a microservices architecture with gRPC for inter-service communication to minimize latency in critical dispatch workflows.
Messaging and event streaming
NATS enabled real-time event streaming between dispatch units, ambulance drivers, and hospitals. The key insight was designing for failure — every service must degrade gracefully when dependencies are unavailable.
Security in healthcare
Security in healthcare is non-negotiable. RBAC with granular permissions, input validation, and secure data handling are baseline requirements when dealing with sensitive patient information.
Takeaways
The hardest part wasn't building individual services — it was making them work together under pressure. Circuit breakers, retry policies, and health checks became as important as the business logic itself.