Electronic Health Reporter

The healthcare industry has grown by leaps and bounds over the past few decades. The paper-loaded clinics and hospitals have been replaced by tech-savvy smart data applications that extend themselves to more agile hospital management systems. Data lies at the key of the healthcare industry and is considered the true treasure of the trove. However, this data needs to be easily accessible and adhere to the relevant security protocols. This is where DevOps in healthcare weighs in.

It is the answer to gaining a competitive edge through responsive, data-driven, and superior care-giving.

The hindrances with traditional healthcare software development, whether it is the Waterfall, V, or RUP model, is lacking with the agility toward today’s business needs. Higher costs with lower productivity, lack of flexibility, and accessibility to data are the common backdrops of the traditional software delivery lifecycle method. Implementation of DevOps is an efficient way to combat the inadequacies through custom healthcare software development.

What is DevOps?
DevOps is the expertise of the merger of agile infrastructure and operational excellence. Healthcare software developers collaborate to create a process of operations and development for better efficiency and agility into the entire lifecycle to provide integrated care solutions. DevOps for healthcare is a qualitative integration of software development with operational efficiency. It is an extension of Agile technology toward the overall operations of custom healthcare solutions.

Traditional IT and DevOps – Key Differences
Rigidity vs. Flexibility: Traditional healthcare IT solutions go through a rigid lifecycle from the development of the software, testing, Q&A, staging, delivery, and finally, feedback.

DevOps in healthcare focus keenly on the value of development and delivery for value creation and risk mitigation.

Macro vs. Micro: Traditional healthcare software solutions focused on a big project release that involves high costs and occurs infrequently. In contrast, DevOps and healthcare adopt a micro approach, avoiding complex releases and mitigating risks for gradual advancement at regular intervals with lower risks.

Data Monitoring vs. Data Sharing: Traditional healthcare IT solutions have a cumbersome data sharing process due to management approvals and lengthy reports. DevOps and healthcare solutions have a dedicated data sharing team to reduce management time wastage and provides relevant data to the specific team.

Step-by-step Guide to Implement DevOps in Healthcare
Step 1 – Continuous planning:

Examine the development and operational activities to modify them towards the implementation of DevOps. Financial implications of development and required human resources must be planned during this phase.

Step 2 – Code repository with version control:

Ensure a version control system, which is an essential requirement for developers to coordinate and control coding. Every custom healthcare solution code repository can be tracked, along with the changes applied. Healthcare application development with DevOps should provide developers with an offline copy of the code repository, along with every change recorded on the main server.

Step 3 – Continuous Integration (CI):
Focus on continually merging changes in the code to the central repository, before building and testing. Deploy CI tools toward the efficient management of the healthcare application development to ensure the accuracy of the configuration and integration. CI assists with the automation of software updates and cross-departmental integration of data.

Step 4 – Automated Build:
Bring automation toward integrated care solutions, wherein scripting and automated retrieval of the code are deployed. This recovery should be enabled from the code repository and is then compiled into a binary artifact to allow for periodic testing.

Step 5 – Automated Release through Continuous Deployment (CD):
This step toward delivery and deployment of custom medical solutions involves the delivery of the software and regular updates in an automated and continual fashion. CD is a process that ensures any time release of the custom healthcare solutions through regular updates to the production.

Step 6 – Constant feedback and monitoring:
This final step is the deployment of DevOps is the key to sustainability. Adopt continuous monitoring to ensure that healthcare software development applications are performing at an optimal level. A micro approach should be adopted to look into every small detail and seeks feedback at regular intervals through self-monitoring analytics that gathers data in an automated fashion.

DevOps in Healthcare Best Practices
Understand the collaboration and shared tools strategy for the Dev, QA, and infrastructure.

For additional insights in implementing DevOps in healthcare, visit: https://www.osplabs.com/insights/how-to-implement-devops-in-healthcare/