Is DevOps what the doctor ordered for the healthcare sector?

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Software development for healthcare products is a demanding task. The pressure on organizations to improve their development and delivery outcomes is at an all-time high. Go-to-market speed is in focus as is agility and responsiveness to changing government regulations and patient care needs. 

This is compelling many to embrace Dev Ops tools and methodologies for healthcare software development   

What role does DevOps play in healthcare? 

Healthcare organizations have always had a tough time keeping up with shifting market trends, evolving customer requirements, and stringent regulations. There has been great momentum toward DevOps implementation across finance, manufacturing, and retail sectors. The healthcare sector, although slow to adopt, is now coming to terms with the potential business impact of establishing a DevOps function to innovate and stay competitive. According to a recent study, 73% of global IT professionals in healthcare have now adopted DevOps to enable adaptability and agility.  

With many patients today expecting healthcare providers to offer quick and convenient services, DevOps makes it easy for organizations to introduce new services such as digital healthcare records, telehealth services, wearable devices, follow-up texts as well as personalized medicine. This cross-functional development methodology combines the benefits of automation and agile practices, ensuring the quick delivery of high-quality software to enable better patient outcomes.  

Furthermore, using advanced toolchains, DevOps also optimizes performance and improves collaboration between different departments.  

Responding to Modern HealthCare Challenges with DevOps 

By empowering traditionally-siloed teams to work better together, DevOps paves the way for faster innovation while constantly fostering a culture of continuous integration, development, and deployment.  

Here’s how healthcare institutions can respond to the growing challenges with DevOps:  

1. Better patient engagement and satisfaction: DevOps along with the concept of CI/CD allows new changes and features desired by patients to be quickly and easily implemented, integrated, and delivered. It also helps healthcare and solution organizations keep up with evolving trends and market requirements while driving better patient engagement and satisfaction. 
2. Faster deployment: With technology changing at a lightning-fast speed, DevOps allows for innovations to be deployed quickly and efficiently. Through the implementation of advanced technology, organizations are better positioned to improve operational efficiency and more easily address evolving patient needs – without compromising patient security or the quality of care they receive.
3. Improved competitive advantage: As value-based care models emerge, DevOps allows organizations to improve care quality and patient outcomes. Since DevOps allows for automated infrastructure management and testing, it helps shorten the SDLC. This allows teams to quickly rectify bugs, deploy updates, and ensure flexibility – much before competition – thus improving competitive advantage. 
   
4. Enhanced regulatory compliance: Compliance in the healthcare sector is extremely complex, especially if development workflows are messy and project tracking is not streamlined. DevOps enables teams to keep track of project progress and updates and make configuration changes repeatable and standardized while setting the foundation of continuous reviews and feedback. It allows multiple teams working on different features to always stay abreast of the latest efforts, take responsibility for hits and misses, and foster a culture of compliance.  
5. Better patient diagnosis and treatment: Healthcare organizations deal with humongous amounts of patient and clinical data that need regular updating, processing, and storing. A DevOps function can provide the required support to development teams and ensure data is constantly up-to-date and ready for utilization by advanced algorithms. Using DevOps, teams can more efficiently extract, transform, and load patient data and make the right evidence-based decisions for the right diagnosis and treatment.  

As healthcare organizations drive efforts in digitalizing their operations, the amount of data collected is also increasing. With patients expecting more personalized insights into their health and better treatments, how healthcare organizations act on growing volumes of data is quickly becoming a competitive differentiator.  DevOps allows healthcare organizations to focus on boosting patient satisfaction, especially as expectations around holistic care surge.  

In Conclusion 

The healthcare sector is under immense pressure to deliver solutions while maintaining security and integrity of patient sensitive data. DevOps implementation is the best feasible approach towards addressing the modern-day problems prevalent in the healthcare industry.  

From our experience building DevOps function, there are quite a few bumps and bruises along the way towards successfully implementing it within the realms of healthcare. It’s an arduous journey; getting everyone on board and facilitating this change can be quite an undertaking. However, it can be done with the help of an experienced DevOps partner with a strong background in healthcare. The results will keep your healthcare organization competitive in a world where patients’ expectations of the healthcare industry experience continue to rise. To know more, drop a mail to info@adtechcorp.in