Ms. Reshma Thakkallapelly

Event-Driven Microservices in Healthcare: A Practical Playbook

Abstract:

Healthcare workflows—prior auth, benefits checks, eConsent, specialty pharmacy fills—are naturally asynchronous and cross-organizational. For these journeys, event-driven microservices outperform request/response by decoupling teams, smoothing load, and improving resilience. This talk distills a practical playbook from real-world deployments: when to choose queues (SQS) vs. streams (Kinesis/MSK), how to model events and contracts, and how to orchestrate long-lived processes with Step Functions while keeping services autonomous. We’ll cover idempotency and exactly-once semantics in practice (keys, dedupe windows, outbox/CDC), retries and DLQs that don’t hide data loss, and patterns for saga coordination (choreography vs. orchestration). Attendees will leave with concrete architectures, failure-handling runbooks, and observability dashboards aligned to SLIs/SLOs. We’ll also address security for PHI (token scopes, least privilege, audit trails) and strategies to control cost without sacrificing reliability. If you’re modernizing patient-facing APIs or scaling site operations, this session gives you the patterns and guardrails to ship with confidence.

Profile:

I’m an architecture-focused backend lead who designs and ships resilient, secure services on AWS and on-prem. My work spans event-driven microservices,REST API design, and data/workflow modeling, with hands-on delivery across ECS/Lambda/EC2, CloudWatch, VPC,CloudFormation, and SNS. I build paved-road CI/CD (Jenkins, GitHub, Ansible), lead offshore teams, and modernize legacy stacks (WebLogic/PLM) into maintainable, observable platforms. Past roles include senior engineering at Apple and earlier platform/product-lifecycle systems work at TCS.