Surescripts is a health information network that focuses on improving the secure exchange of health information between healthcare organizations. Its primary goal is to enhance the safety, efficiency, and quality of healthcare through electronic transactions and data exchange.

The team at Surescripts uses Apache Cassandra to support their messaging system.  With a market share (as of 2019) of 95% of the clinic/hospital-to-pharmacy network, they process more than 45 million messages each day.  While some messages can be up to 20 MB in size, most are as small as 4 KB.  Preserving the order of the messages is also of great importance, so each message processed also includes any preceding message as well.

The main application using Apache Cassandra at Surescripts is the Pending Transaction Service (PTS).  The PTS needs to support transactions and messages across multiple, geographically-disparate data centers.  Their previous relational database could not support the speed at which they required cross-DC replication to complete.  Cassandra has not only solved this problem but been a solid solution for the application.

In summary, Surescripts’ use of Apache Cassandra allows them to support the pharmacy messaging network across the United States.  Cassandra lets them easily store and serve more than 11 TB of data, ensuring that everyone gets the prescriptions they need.