Understand the opportunities, risks and best practices of adopting DevOps in healthcare to make the right business and technology decisions and reach meaningful change in your health delivery organization.
DevOps — a set of tools and practices that aim to improve collaboration between traditionally siloed developers and operations teams — is becoming a gold standard in healthcare software development.
Implementing DevOps best practices into a medical application development lifecycle enables healthcare companies to successfully keep up with the ever-changing healthcare technology trends while complying with strict regulatory requirements and delivering high-quality care for patients.
A Redgate report indicates that 73% of professionals in the healthcare domain are already leveraging DevOps.
On the whole, the global DevOps market is demonstrating strong growth potential, driven by the rising demand for rapid software delivery and improved operational efficiency across a variety of industries.
Global DevOps Market Estimated Growth
Source: Market.us
Why Does Your Healthcare Software Project Need DevOps?
DevOps implementation best practices can bring some serious benefits to healthcare delivery businesses. The most substantial ones are:
Cost-Efficient Development Process
Any DevOps strategy relies heavily on automation and continuous integration/deployment. Both of these activities aim to minimize manual tasks and boost efficiency. Be it coding, testing or bug fixing, DevOps reduces unnecessary waste of time on low-value tasks which saves you money.
These savings become particularly noticeable over time when multiplied across several projects.
Improved Software Scalability
Supported by essential DevOps practices such as containerization and orchestration, applications can handle increasing amounts of load, users, data, or other resources without sacrificing performance.
This point is essential when you build healthcare software, as it helps organizations be better prepared for handling enormous patient datasets, for instance, during disasters or pandemics.
Tighter Security
The healthcare industry has always been one of the most vulnerable industries to cybercrime.
Global number of data breaches with confirmed data loss from November 2021 to October 2022, categorized by industry and organization size.
Source: Statista
A well-crafted and adequately implemented DevOps strategy is a sureproof way to bolster your healthcare solution security and avoid expensive fines for data protection breaches that hurt your bottom line.
DevOps security or DevSecOps focuses on ensuring that security is a number one priority throughout the entire development lifecycle.
Companies get an enhanced level of system security through automated security tests and checks included at each development phase. Iterative testing ensures the system code moves forth and reaches the next development stage only when it meets the necessary security standards.
It’s also important to note that spotting and fixing security issues in the live environment is more expensive than during development. It can cause massive downtimes, loss of data, or other forms of service disruption and revenue loss.
DevSecOps helps address security code vulnerabilities early when they are easiest to detect and least expensive to fix.
Healthier And More Productive Work Environment
There is now growing evidence that companies can lose up to billions per year because of disengaged employees.
In contrast, statistics from various sources reveal that when one’s workers are happy, organizations thrive.
The DevOps approach changes the way developers and operation managers would traditionally behave if something went wrong after some code was deployed. In the usual scenario, developers would be accused of writing poor code, software testers for missing bugs, and operations managers for deployment errors.
The culture of shared insights and collaborative responsibility for the whole software development lifecycle eliminates mistrust and finger-pointing between teams, adding to healthier work relationships, more effective decision-making and fewer unexpected software development problems.
Faster Time To Market
Inadequate or poor communication between teams can cause misunderstandings about project requirements, specifications, or timelines, leading to a flawed final product, delays in delivery and, often, lost business opportunities.
DevOps emphasizes communication between dev and ops teams, leading to faster turnaround times due to reduced misunderstandings, misinterpretations or delays caused by miscommunication.
DevOps Toolchain: Essential Tools You Can’t Do Without
The heart of DevOps is a toolchain — a series of tools that will automate and streamline medical software delivery processes, from code commit to production deployment.
Planning: Work management solutions like Jira, Trello, Asana, and Clarizen can help unify all teams working on a common goal in a collaborative, transparent space.
Issue Tracking: Consider adopting Jira, ZenDesk, and Backlog to track issues during development easier and faster.
Testing and QA: Continuous testing tools like Selenium, JUnit, or TestNG make the process of testing more efficient, enabling teams to execute test cases, generate test reports, and catch defects in the initial development stages.
Continuous Integration: CI tools like CircleCI, Bamboo, Jenkins, and TeamCity automatically build and test code changes, providing developers with instant feedback.
Use them to easily detect and resolve potential errors that may arise during code integration.
Continuous Deployment: Kubernetes, Docker, and Ansible are CD tools engineers choose to streamline the deployment and configuration of applications across development, testing, and production and reduce time-to-market.
Version control systems (VCS): Version control is a system that tracks changes to files over time so that engineers can retrieve specific versions later.
Things like Git, Subversion, and Mercurial are designed to help them properly manage source code changes, improving collaboration and ensuring version control.
Configuration Management: Consider adding Puppet, Chef, and Ansible to your toolchain, as they can support managing your infrastructure as code, preventing configuration drifts across environments.
Monitoring: Continuous monitoring is the final stage in the DevOps lifecycle and a must for smooth execution.
Tools like BigPanda, Sensu, Prometheus, Splunk, and ELK Stack (Elasticsearch, Logstash, Kibana) can monitor metrics, collect logs, and analyze system behavior in real time.
Such monitoring ensures performance transparency and minimizes systems downtime and business disruptions.
DevOps Implementation In Healthcare: Best Practices
DevOps isn’t just using a new set of tools and methodologies; it’s a big change to technologies, processes, and culture that will require a shift in the way everyone involved in the development process thinks and works.
By embracing these DevOps best practices, teams building healthcare software can do their job faster, with fewer mistakes and in a more secure manner which is a win for healthcare delivery organizations.
Test Automation For Better Regulatory Compliance
Healthcare technologies and applications must comply with stringent regulatory standards such as HIPAA, HITECH, FDA, CMS, JCAHO, etc.
The traditional model of automated testing implies that engineers create a set of tests and execute them at the end of the development cycle.
When DevOps and its test automation and continuous CI/CD methods come into play, the software is continuously deployed to production and regularly updated.
This ensures that software is thoroughly tested, ready and safe at each phase of the development life cycle.
In healthcare, where a breach of regulatory standards endangers patient safety and opens the door to legal consequences and reputational harm, DevOps test automation reduces the risk of human error contributing to compliance with regulatory requirements.
Build Cross-Functional Teams
Cross-functional teams — teams where professionals from different disciplines work together sharing diverse skill sets — empower working in the style of DevOps.
Encourage collaboration between developers, QA specialists, operations engineers and other stakeholders to accelerate product delivery and reduce operational silos.
Measure DevOps Performance
Before implementing a DevOps model, it’s important to have a clear idea about the methods for measuring its success. This way, you will be able to detect performance bottlenecks, notice anomalies, and ensure optimal system health.
Some important metrics to measure are:
- Deployment frequencies
- Deployment Failure Rate
- Change fail rate
- Mean time to recovery
- Lead time (time from development to deployment)
- Speed of testing, updating, etc.
Foster Continuous Feedback And Dialogue
When integrating the world of medicine with first-time software, close collaboration between DevOps teams and clinical professionals is critical.
Fostering continuous feedback and dialogue bridges the gap between development teams and stakeholders putting the end-users at the center of the entire development process. This, in turn, ensures that the final product can be used with little or no complications.
Put Emphasis On Learning And Improvement
At its core, DevOps it’s about continuous experimentation, learning, and improvement.
A DevOps-competent employee needs an ongoing commitment to DevOps skills development and mastery.
Invest in employee training to improve workforce skills and competencies and keep them updated on emerging technologies and best practices.
Industry sources like articles, publications, conferences and tool vendors’ roadmaps for DevOps and related frameworks are a good help for DevOps professionals looking for training information.
Some Possible DevOps Challenges To Bear In Mind
As a software development company offering DevOps services, Elinext knows firsthand about the challenges of implementing the DevOps model.
Legacy Infrastructure
Implementing DevOps into legacy client infrastructure poses a serious challenge because of the differences between traditional systems and modern DevOps tools.
The rigid and inflexible nature of legacy systems lacks the agility required for seamless integration with DevOps pipelines, impeding automation, continuous integration, and deployment.
To overcome this challenge, healthcare providers need to evaluate their legacy systems’ infrastructure and identify areas that require urgent modernization.
Doing things this way will reduce the risks of incompatibility, ensure continuity, and build confidence among stakeholders.
Selecting The Right DevOps Metrics
As we’ve mentioned earlier, healthcare and medical organizations need to measure the effectiveness and efficiency of DevOps processes by tracking metrics.
The challenge lies in the fact that not all of the aforementioned metrics may be applicable or valuable for a specific company. Determining the metrics important to your organization can turn out to be a daunting task.
To combat this problem, businesses can use analytics platforms or dashboards to gather and visualize data on different aspects of the DevOps process. These tools recognize the patterns and trends in companies’ data, identify opportunities for improvement, and help them determine which metrics they need to track.
Talent Recruitment
As a healthcare tech executive, you may have made a great effort to create the perfect DevOps strategy for the desired solution development.
Yet, the lack of competent DevOps engineers in the current global workforce to carry out that work can ruin even the most winning business plan.
Fortunately, Elinext with its team of vetted DevOps engineers can help you with the problem.
Why Should You Adopt DevOps For Your Healthcare Software Project with Elinext?
Elinext is a premier full-service custom software development company that offers world-class DevOps services to businesses operating in Healthcare, Banking, Data Analytics, ERP and Asset Management, CRM and Loyalty, Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, Blockchain, Cybersecurity, IoT, and IT Infrastructure Management domains.
The Optimizing and Speeding Up Software Development for Pharmaceutical Companies case is a great example of how Elinext engineers apply DevOps best practices to help our clients experience all the benefits of this methodology.
The Elinext team was hired to work on the improvement of a platform for automating work tracking carried out in laboratories. Our team was expected to:
- improve the security of the solution,
- find the balance between the speed of the CI/CD process,
- upgrade Kubernetes, and
- help improve the project’s DevOps KPIs.
As a result, software development got quicker, the platform became more stable and secure, and the delivery speed increased.
The client also noted that there is a decrease in overall infrastructure costs and they now need less time for operations-related work. Importantly, thanks to AVZ services cost optimization Elinext DevOps engineers performed, our client can save up to 2000 USD/monthly without any decrease in performance.
If you are ready to discuss your healthcare software development project then don’t hesitate to reach out and learn more about our successful cases.
