Event Sourcing for Therapy Documentation - A Solution for Long-Term Storage and Retroactive Analysis
In a world where medicine and technology are becoming increasingly intertwined, we seek solutions that help us understand and manage the complexity of treatment processes. By applying event sourcing, we can store our treatment documentation more efficiently and sustainably, facilitating our work and improving our ability to conduct retrospective analyses.
In medicine, treatment processes typically span years and involve various professionals at different stages. Capturing this documentation and generating reports for doctors requires an efficient and sustainable storage solution. This article will explore the benefits of event sourcing as a solution to this challenge.
Why is event sourcing suitable for therapy documentation?
Event sourcing is a database and architectural solution in which all changes to a data set are stored chronologically (events). This offers several advantages for storing therapy documentation:
- Event sourcing provides an efficient way to understand and model the problem domain. A comprehensive understanding of the therapy process can be gained by identifying entities, their names, and the various states and transitions between them.
- However, event sourcing's importance also lies in its ability to store a data set's history. This allows us to determine precisely what information was changed, by whom, and when. Storing events is a practical solution for historically preserving data.
- Event sourcing makes retrospective analysis of therapy processes possible because all data points are accessed retrospectively and modeled as a time sequence. By storing the raw data in event streams with standard identifiers, we can traverse the data and map any desired analyses at any time.
- Event sourcing allows for providing all necessary information to external regulatory authorities. Who did what and when in the system is traceable at any time and cannot be manipulated retrospectively (⇒ audit-proof).
Challenges and Costs
However, it is essential to note that there is no such thing as a free lunch in the IT world. The advantages of event sourcing come with additional effort. We must address eventual consistency. We must also understand that event sourcing corresponds to a different way of thinking, one that is unfamiliar to most developers. This is especially true when compared to traditional storage in SQL or NoSQL databases. Furthermore, providing the data in additional view models is necessary for efficient data access. This is an essential aspect of the CQRS pattern, where events serve as the source for its generation.
Event Sourcing as the Foundation for Microservices
Another advantage of event sourcing is the ability to use it as a flexible message broker for communication between microservices. By using events, we can enable asynchronous communication and develop independent services.
Conclusion
Event sourcing offers an efficient and sustainable solution for storing therapy documentation. It allows us to understand and model the problem domain, store the history of a data set, and perform retrospective analyses. While it brings challenges and costs, event sourcing also offers an opportunity to develop microservices and enable asynchronous communication.
Please get in touch with me if you see a valuable use of event sourcing as a solution in your domain. I look forward to exchanging ideas and working together.
