DevOps: A prescription leading to a cure for healthcare

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My last couple of months were spent on DevOps consulting for a fast-growing US-Healthcare based tech startup. The realization, which in no time I experienced was that the healthcare industry has to comply with complex data security regulations. But at the same time, this industry has goldmines of data at their disposal. Given that multiple regulations and strict security have to be ensured while analyzing and processing data, a DevOps approach for infrastructure management is very much required in healthcare

The healthcare industry has grown and matured significantly over the decades. From shelves filled with files, it has moved on to utilizing the latest IT technology available, dedicated data centers and public or private cloud infrastructure. While the advantages of adopting DevOps methodology throughout IT-Infrastructure are proven, here’s what it means to adopt DevOps workflows in healthcare:

• Adherence to compliances and data security: Handling the personal data of customers became much more closely monitored and regulated in the present day scenario. Several of the main requirements of the new regulation is limiting the levels of access to the data to the minimally required, ensuring the transparency of data handling, security of data storage, and the customer’s right to demand the deletion of their personal details whenever he asks for. From a DevOps perspective, this means eliminating all kinds of waste, as well as ensuring optimal performance and security of operations. In terms of software delivery, automated unit tests ensure thorough code testing to minimize the risk of code bugs and backdoor access to the apps. In terms of operations, constant monitoring of infrastructure performance allows determining the optimal ways of system functioning, removing multiple bottlenecks and potential security breaches. In terms of compliance, the regulatory requirements are easily codified and automatically applied while designing and implementing the cloud infrastructure, greatly reducing the operational overhead and simplifying the compliance checks from the authorities.
• Shorter time to market for your products: When the cloud infrastructure management is automated, the software delivery lifecycle becomes much more predictable and the resulting time to market for your product updates is significantly shorter.
• Improved infrastructure efficiency: Developing applications and healthcare services is a critical process to deliver new healthcare solutions. However, this process must be managed properly so that you don’t experience vast amounts of resources sprawl. DevOps offers ways to leverage resources much more efficiently. For example, an event-driven serverless architecture allows developers to leverage only the resources they need for the app or microservice being developed. It’s basically the utility consumption of resources when creating applications and services. So, when you’re leveraging a healthcare cloud provider (AWS or Azure) on their HIPAA-compliant architecture, you can do some pretty powerful things with DevOps and application delivery.
• Data-driven approach: As patient data continues to grow at an exponential rate, healthcare providers have turned to DevOps in an effort to accelerate their complex big data project deployments. With a variety of data sources ranging from Electronic Health Records (EHRs), medical devices, pharmacies, and lab reports, to insurance claims, comes the need to structure, update and analyze that data for effective and improved healthcare delivery. The deployment delays associated with a traditional software development life cycle can significantly raise the cost and affect the overall usability of the project.

Most of the public cloud vendors are now offering solutions which can be effectively leveraged to build healthcare management platforms at scale. Following are a few:

• Healthcare & Life sciences by AWS
• Microsoft Azure’s health cloud platform
• Google’s standards-based healthcare API

The healthcare industry is rapidly developing data-driven technology solutions to further patient-centered care all while reducing costs. With the healthcare landscape shifting to an on-demand delivery system of medical services and solutions, healthcare providers and hospitals are turning to DevOps in an effort to advance healthcare innovation.

At OpsLyft, we are passionate about everything related to the cloud. We work with customers across geographies to provide state of art DevOps services. We’d love to hear your DevOps challenges and success stories, please do write to us at contact@opslyft.com. I’m sure we’ll just fit in well for you :)