Design a healthcare data ingestion pipeline
PremiumData pipelineMedium
- PHI
- HL7
- FHIR
Quick answer
This data pipeline interview question asks you to design a healthcare data ingestion pipeline. Aim for a design that moves data from sources to consumers reliably and on time, then explain ingestion, processing, storage and trade-offs. Interviewers want to see how you handle volume, late or bad data and failures along the way.
The problem
Design a healthcare data ingestion pipeline that takes in millions of patient records a day from hospitals, labs and insurers and turns them into clean, curated tables. The hard parts are sensitive data, duplicates, malformed rows and corrected record versions, while one bad partner never blocks the others.
About 300 partners send files over SFTP or an upload API in three formats: CSV extracts, HL7 v2 messages and FHIR JSON bundles. Partners resend files, send the same record twice, send rows with missing or invalid fields, and later send corrected versions of a record (for example an amended lab result). Analysts and care apps read the curated tables, and engineers must be able to reprocess past files after fixing a mapping bug.
What must a healthcare data ingestion pipeline do?
- Validated ingestion: Accept partner files, check them against a manifest and schema, and validate every row before it reaches curated tables.
- Fault isolation: A malformed file, a slow partner or a mapping bug for one partner never delays other partners.
How well must it do it?
- Data protection: Patient data is encrypted in transit and at rest, every access is logged, and staff see only the minimum data their role needs.
- Freshness: Valid rows reach curated tables within 2 hours of file arrival.
What scale should you design for?
Use these numbers in your estimates.
The scale numbers unlock with this questionUnlock
Key concepts
- PHI
- HL7
- FHIR
- Quarantine
- Deduplication
- Record versioning
How you’ll practise
- Requirements
- Data volume
- Ingestion
- Storage and processing
- Serving and freshness
- Wrap-up
Lala, personalized to you, gives a hint when you ask and reviews your design when you are ready.
What do interviewers look for?
In any data pipeline design round.
- Clarifies sources, consumers and freshness needs
- Chooses batch, streaming or both with reasons
- Handles late, duplicate and malformed records
- Makes each stage safe to retry
- Explains storage formats and partitioning
- Plans monitoring, backfills and data quality checks
Questions people ask about this interview question
- Which design type is this question?
- It is a data pipeline question. You design a healthcare data ingestion pipeline and explain your choices the way you would in an interview.
- Is this question asked at entry level?
- It is marked Medium. Entry-level engineers can practise it, but it expects you to reason about requirements and trade-offs, not only list components.
- What should I cover first?
- Start with the data sources, the consumers and how fresh the data must be. Agree on scope with the interviewer before you design anything.
- Can I practise it for free?
- It is a premium question. Sign up and unlock it once for 10 credits; it then stays unlocked. When you finish, Lala, your personalized AI mentor, can review your design for 30 credits.
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Updated · Written by the SevyDevy team