Axon — Clinical Scheduling Platform

Building a reliable scheduling system used by clinicians, therapists and administrators across Cortica clinics.

From Chaos To A Reliable Schedule

Cortica cares for children on the autism spectrum through a network of clinics, clinicians, therapists and caregivers. Behind every session is a quiet but complex coordination problem: lining up therapist availability, patient schedules, clinic room constraints and external healthcare systems — all without dropping a single appointment.

When I joined the Axon team, the scheduling platform powering this process was incomplete and fragile. Workflows would stall mid–execution, updates from systems like Athenahealth and CentralReach were unreliable, and schedulers could not trust the tool that sat at the center of their day. The goal of my work was simple to say and hard to deliver: turn Axon into an invisible, dependable backbone for scheduling across 1000+ clinicians and 4000+ therapy interns.

Designing a system schedulers could trust

We re–imagined Axon as a resilient workflow engine rather than a simple CRUD app. Every appointment creation flows from the React scheduler UI through an API Gateway into a set of AWS Lambda services orchestrated by Step Functions. Each step writes its progress into an RDS–backed state store, so if a Lambda fails or an external system timeouts, the workflow can resume instead of silently corrupting data.

On the frontend, I worked as a full‑stack engineer on a React + GraphQL experience that made this complexity feel simple: schedulers see real‑time availability, conflict warnings, and status updates without thinking about Lambdas, retries or state machines.

What “create appointment” actually means

Under the hood, a single “Create” click fans out into a series of guarded steps:

• Validate therapist availability and clinic‑level rules
• Check patient eligibility and plan coverage
• Reserve slots while synchronizing with external systems
• Generate billing and audit records
• Broadcast real‑time updates to other schedulers

The architecture ensures that either the full chain succeeds, or the system knows exactly where and why it stopped — a critical guarantee when families and clinicians rely on the schedule being correct.

How Axon moves a request

React Scheduler UI (clinics nationwide) ↓ GraphQL / API Gateway Lambda services (validation, orchestration) ↓ AWS Step Functions (workflow engine) ↓ RDS (durable workflow + appointments state) ↓ External systems • Athenahealth • CentralReach

Debugging at the scale of thousands of logs

Early in the project, failures were reported as “the appointment just disappeared.” Diagnosing that meant stitching together thousands of CloudWatch log lines across multiple Lambdas and Step Function executions to reconstruct what actually happened.

By correlating traces across services and surfacing clearer status signals back into the UI, we turned obscure infrastructure issues into understandable, actionable messages for schedulers. Over time, those fixes transformed Axon from a source of anxiety into a tool they could rely on to keep clinics running smoothly.