The healthcare sector is constantly expanding and has seen tremendous growth in recent decades. Their quick ascent necessitates process improvements. To handle the growing patient volume, operational strain, and towering data piles, they require more effective systems. Adopting digital transformation is one clear method.
They must replace their antiquated paper-based environment with a contemporary IT infrastructure. As a result, healthcare institutions are already implementing tech-savvy procedures. Because technology enables businesses to automate their procedures and concentrate more on patient care, there is a growing need for custom healthcare software development.
Most healthcare organizations now have an IT department that oversees the delivery and maintenance of their digital hospital services. The department takes care of software solutions across the entire healthcare organization and ensures they are easily accessible to users.
As the role of IT is increasing for healthcare businesses, they require a more efficient approach to managing their digital services. This is why DevOps services and solutions are becoming popular in the healthcare sector, helping organizations to align their services to customer demands. As per stats, the share of healthcare organizations that have adopted DevOps is 73%.
As IT becomes more and more integrated into their services, more healthcare firms are embracing DevOps. To learn more about DevOps, its advantages in the healthcare industry, and how to incorporate it into your company’s workflow, continue reading.
What Is DevOps In Healthcare
To put it simply, DevOps is a fusion of IT operations (Ops) and software development (Dev), with a focus on integration, communication, and teamwork to boost productivity. DevOps’s ultimate objective is to streamline the software delivery process by dismantling silos and automating procedures between the development and operations teams.
The term “DevOps in healthcare” describes how DevOps processes and ideas are applied in the healthcare sector to expedite the development of medical apps. In particular, DevOps enables iterative improvement in product development by utilizing a continuous integration/continuous deployment (CI/CD) pipeline. Over time, this approach aids healthcare institutions in navigating the complexity of interoperability, clinical procedures, and other strict health information sharing laws.
Furthermore, DevOps promotes the use of automated testing methods like test-driven development and behavior-driven development. These testing approaches are essential in ensuring the accuracy and reliability of complex algorithms used in diagnostic software, patient management systems, and telehealth solutions.
How to Adopt DevOps in Healthcare
Seventy-three percent of hospital IT teams now choose DevOps as their development approach. Let’s examine the necessary actions to implement DevOps in your healthcare company:
1. Planning
Planning is the initial stage of the DevOps process. It involves evaluating your operational and development activities and aligning them with the principles of the DevOps methodology. This stage also requires you to assess your technical and human resources, inventory, software guidelines, and security policies. In some cases, the planning phases may involve coordinating meetings with various teams for task allocation.
2. Use a Version Control System
Having a version control system is crucial for developers to coordinate and manage coding in the context of DevOps in healthcare. It allows tracking of custom healthcare solution code repositories and the applied changes. In DevOps healthcare software development, developers should have an offline copy of the code repository, while keeping a record of every change made on the main server.
3. Continuous Integration
The central repository should receive all system changes and new code modules from the CI server. This facilitates code sharing and merging across different departments, while also ensuring efficient code management to avoid any potential delays.
4. Automated Build
Enable automation for integrated care solutions by deploying scripting and automated code retrieval. This enables recovery from the code repository and compilation into a binary artifact for periodic testing.
5. Continuous Testing
The shared repository must undergo continuous testing to verify its functionality. If the test returns positive results, it proceeds to the next phase. However, if the test fails or is inconclusive, the system analyzes the error and cross-references it with its database. This process is conducted to identify known errors and, in the case of a new error, generate a report and initiate an incident. The incident is then assigned to the development team, who will track its progress using an incident tracker.
6. Continuous Deployment
If the code passes the tests, it is deployed on either the production or development system, depending on the company’s protocol. This guarantees swift and continuous code deployment.
7. Monitoring and Constant Feedback
DevOps relies on sustainability as its foundation. Implementing continuous monitoring is crucial for ensuring the optimal performance of healthcare software development applications. Also, organizations should look into every minor detail of the project while gathering feedback periodically through self-monitoring analytics.
Read Also: What Are the Benefits of Choosing an End-to-End Software Solution for Enterprises?
As a DevOps service provider, we have seen many obstacles that keep healthcare organizations from implementing this approach. If you want to apply DevOps in healthcare in a smooth and hassle-free manner, keep the following points in mind:
1. Ensure The Sustainability of Your DevOps Environment
In DevOps, code ownership is shared among different teams, leading to additional work and time spent on setting up environments and making code changes.
The solution here is to create infrastructural blueprints that serve as a central reference for all stakeholders to keep all environments consistent with each other. This approach establishes a unified platform for coding and testing, making it easier to access, facilitating continuous development, and improving overall efficiency.
2. Adopt Continuous Skills Development
The software team’s success in navigating the DevOps transformation is closely linked to their technical and human resources. As part of the core principle of DevOps in healthcare – continuous everything, healthcare organizations should invest in cutting-edge tools and internal training to foster a strong DevOps culture and expertise within the team.
3. Keep Up With AI and Data Analytics
In today’s healthtech industry, the main focus is on merging data analytics and AI/ML technologies to enhance data processing and, consequently, improve patient outcomes.
However, it is crucial for DevOps engineers to thoroughly assess the performance and security measures of any external tool, as they can damage the functionality and integrity of your healthcare solution.
4. Allocate Your Resources Effectively
People tend to choose the optimum tools and technologies, assuming they will deliver top-notch performance. However, they may not fully leverage all the available resources that those tools provide. Therefore, it is crucial to invest time in optimizing your environment settings to maximize the value of your resources.
5. Consult with DevOps Experts
Boarding a specialized DevOps team can greatly alleviate the burden on internal resources of healthcare organizations. This allows the in-house team to prioritize patient-centric goals instead of being hindered by technical obstacles.
Furthermore, healthcare firms may pile up technical debt over time due to legacy system maintenance or rushed development cycles. However, dedicated DevOps engineers, with their extensive tooling and platform knowledge, can step in to modernize your systems without disrupting current service operations.
Principles of the DevOps Model
Some of the guiding principles of this organizational structure form the basis of DevOps. The DevOps model’s team relationships and structure are determined by these concepts. Let us examine these principles.
Decisions Based on Data
Data is the core concept of DevOps, and it is used at every level of decision-making. When it comes to choosing the tech stack or tools to orchestrate the process, data should be collected based on decisions you make to ensure that the choices match the team’s metrics.
For example, the KPI (Key Performance Indicator) for a team can be the time taken to resolve an issue. Your decision about choosing new tools or procedures for the process will be guided by the KPI which is the average resolution time. This will help you decide whether the new addition is good or not by comparing it with benchmark data.
Collaboration
Team collaboration is the foundation of DevOps methodology as it integrates the development and operations teams. With close collaboration, the development team can ensure a better configuration of applications for the operation phase, and the operations team can ensure they meet the requirements by testing applications earlier.
Optimal information-sharing is another advantage of this collaboration. Any issue discovered when an application is deployed can be logged so that the development team can consider it in the next build. Feedback is also important. Positive feedback improves team morale and negative feedback encourages them for improvement.
Continuous Improvement
Constant improvement and evolution is the backbone of DevOps processes. It follows the idea of incremental releases in Agile. Earlier software development methodologies focused on delivering software products with all the features at once. However, it requires longer execution time which results in project delays.
The incremental development method allows developers to release an MVP (Minimal Viable Product) to meet the core needs of users. After this, new features and upgrades are released constantly to improve the functionality of the product. Users can benefit from the product earlier and learn new features when they are available.
Complete Responsibility
In DevOps, every team takes responsibility throughout the software development lifecycle. Development teams used to code and build applications then provided them to the operations team for testing and deployment in the earlier software development models. However, DevOps ensures that the entire team is involved in the process from the planning phase to deployment.
Both the development and operations teams work hand in hand to resolve issues and integrate software upgrades. The development team works on improving the software and adding new functionalities.
Customer-focused Decisions
The customer is the focus of the DevOps process, and it functions in a way to achieve that. There is always stress on how certain things will benefit the customer before making any decision. Feedback is collected from the customer to make a plan for improvements.
Live monitoring is also used to track problems and avoid them making an issue for users. The team can utilize tools to track users’ live interactions with the application and check if they are facing any friction. Because of the close collaboration of development and operations, new updates are quickly pushed to maintain a good user experience.
How Does DevOps Benefit a Healthcare Organization?
The following are some advantages of implementing DevOps in healthcare organizations.
Process Automation
Implementation of DevOps in healthcare offers automation that provides tons of benefits. It enables healthcare organizations to create and offer better applications that satisfy SLAs (Service Level Agreements). Automation helps healthcare organizations streamline their workflows and ensures seamless delivery of high-quality digital solutions.
DevOps introduces the CI (Continuous Integration)/CD (Continuous Deployment) cycle with automation in the process allowing organizations to quickly build and deliver applications. This process provides an efficient way to deliver IT services with the maximum uptime. DevOps helps you create a CI CD pipeline for healthcare that runs a loop where applications are created and deployed incrementally.
Effective Data Management
Following a data-driven approach is beneficial in developing and delivering digital solutions. Data can provide crucial insights into patients’ needs that will help you design and develop reliable solutions. It will improve productivity and give you a competitive edge. However, healthcare organizations generate a vast amount of data that normal tools cannot process.
DevOps offers tools and technologies to process that data with big data applications. Healthcare providers can process different types of data like medical device reports, electronic health records, and lap reports with a streamlined data pipeline and ecosystem. They can analyze the data and get useful insights.
Better Services
Healthcare organizations that have implemented DevOps leverage the CI/CD pipeline to deliver features more quickly and reliably. It results in increased customer trust and operational efficiency. New and updated features are promptly available to patients which increases their level of satisfaction. For example, features like filing e-prescriptions will enable patients to get their medicines even without being present at the premises.
Similarly, features like self-check-in will speed up the processing of patients. These kinds of features will improve patient satisfaction. With DevOps, you will be able to build and roll out such features quickly. These features will address the requirements of patients for quick and convenient healthcare services. Hence, you can utilize DevOps to improve your organizational efficiency that will allow you to deliver better services.
Security and Compliance
The safety of data flowing through various processes is a priority for healthcare organizations. Hence, they need a process workflow that minimizes the risk of data breaches and helps in a prompt response. Organizations that focus on security adopt the DevSecOps methodology that includes development, operations, and security.
DevSecOps adds a security layer to the DevOps framework, and it is included in the software development Lifecyle. Unlike DevOps where security checks are performed at the last stage, in DevSecOps it is done at every phase of the development cycle. There are many differences between DevOps and DevSecOps but the underlying philosophy is the same, to break the silos between teams.
With the DevSecOps model, software engineers fix vulnerabilities during both development and deployment. Access to crucial areas of the IT system is restricted under the “least privilege” principle. All this provides greater security for your applications and processes.
