Using the Beam to fight COVID-19

At HCA Healthcare we use Elixir. With 186 hospitals our scale breaks many vendor products. In 2018 we began building a new, fit-for-purpose integration platform “Waterpark” to help both at the bedside, streamlining patient notifications, and helping our executives manage the operations more efficiently. We chose the ErlangVM and Elixir for all of the usual reasons. When COVID19 arrived, an interesting tech story became something more serious; more essential.

In this talk we will discuss our COVID-19 use cases, and how the patterns of the BEAM map so well onto healthcare. We will discuss process pairs, long-lived digital twins, no-masters, continuous availability, location transparency, the bit-syntax for clinical data, soft real-time, and hot-code loading. You will also get a brief tour of HCA Healthcare’s open sourced HL7 library.

At HCA Healthcare we use Elixir. With 186 hospitals our scale breaks many vendor products. In 2018 we began building a new, fit-for-purpose integration platform “Waterpark” to help both at the bedside, streamlining patient notifications, and helping our executives manage the operations more efficiently. We chose the ErlangVM and Elixir for all of the usual reasons. When COVID19 arrived, an interesting tech story became something more serious; more essential. In this talk we will discuss our COVID-19 use cases, and how the patterns of the BEAM map so well onto healthcare. We will discuss process pairs, long-lived digital twins, no-masters, continuous availability, location transparency, the bit-syntax for clinical data, soft real-time, and hot-code loading. You will also get a brief tour of HCA Healthcare’s open sourced HL7 library.