DevOps for Healthcare: Meaning, Benefits, and Implementation Process

Quick Summary: The adoption of DevOps is increasing for healthcare organizations as they strive to build and deliver software quickly and reliably to users. As the use of digital technology is increasing in the healthcare sector, DevOps becomes the need of the hour because it allows them to quickly offer their digital solutions to patients for improved customer experience and competitive gains. This comprehensive guide provides complete information about DevOps and its role in healthcare. It provides steps to implement DevOps into your organization and other insights.

Healthcare is an ever-rising industry and has grown by leaps and bounds in the past few decades. Their rapid rise calls for advancements in their processes. They need more efficient mechanisms to cope with increasing patient influx, operational burden, and soaring piles of data. An obvious way is by adopting digital transformation.

It requires them to upgrade their paper-loaded ecosystem to a modern IT infrastructure. Consequently, healthcare organizations are now moving to tech-savvy processes. The demand for custom healthcare software development is increasing as it helps organizations automate their processes and focus more on patient care.

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%.

More healthcare organizations are adopting DevOps as IT becomes integral to their services. Keep reading to know what DevOps is, the benefits of DevOps in healthcare, and how you can integrate it into your organizational workflow.

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A Quick Overview of DevOps

DevOps is not a tool or a process, it’s a mindset in essence. When it comes to delivering IT services, the operations and development teams work independently without much communication. DevOps breaks the silos of development and operations teams, bringing them together for better collaboration and productivity.

How Does DevOps Work?

Let’s start with the first thing which is to know how DevOps works. In the DevOps model, the engagement between the development and operations teams is increased so much and sometimes they are also merged into a single team.

Software engineers work throughout the entire lifecycle of an application instead of just the development part. A loop of continuous development, integration, deployment, and monitoring exists that ensures constant delivery of value to the end users.

The processes are automated in DevOps that used to be manual resulting in faster development speed. Teams use a tech stack and toolchain that help them quickly evolve and operate applications. DevOps also removes the communication gap between the operations and development teams which results in smooth development and delivery.

Principles of the DevOps Model

DevOps is based on some principles that are the foundation of this organizational framework. These principles decide the structure and relationship between teams in the DevOps model. Let’s take a look at 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.

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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.

What Do You Need to Do to Implement DevOps in Healthcare?

You can bring reform to your organizational structure by implementing the DevOps methodology. The proper implementation requires some planning and understanding of your existing business processes. DevOps is a term that collectively represents a culture, processes, tools, and technologies.

Let’s check out the steps on how you can adopt DevOps for your healthcare organization.

Planning

Start by reviewing the development and operational activities to find the scope of modification to implement DevOps in the healthcare sector. You also need to assess the requirements for human and technical resources, security policies, software guidelines, and more during this step. Meetings with different teams will help you check on requirements and the need for modifications.

Choose an Agile Methodology

DevOps is often paired with an agile methodology like Scrum. You are not required to adopt everything that comes with the Scrum methodology. Sprint, backlog, and sprint planning are three easy elements to adopt for your system development process.

The Scrum backlog holds the record of tasks at hand that a DevOps team can arrange according to their priorities and pull a subset of those tasks into a sprint. A sprint provides a specific time to complete certain task(s). Sprint planning helps to determine which tasks are to be moved from the backlog to the next sprint.

Use a Version Control System

Version Control System or Source Control helps DevOps teams speed up development and make more successful deployments. There are many popular version control systems. You can use Git which is the most popular version control system.

Implementation of CI

You need to set up the Continuous Integration (CI) server that will commit code changes to the shared repository managed centrally. CI will streamline inter-departmental coding and merge the code. This will result in faster code development, preventing delays in deployment.

Build Automation

It automates the process of creating a software build that includes code compilation, binary creation, and packaging of the binary.

Continuous Testing

The code in the shared repository goes through an automated test to check for errors and to ensure that it’s working. It is advanced to the next phase when the results are positive.

Continuous Deployment

After completing the testing, the application is released with continuous and automated distribution. The application is available in the production environment where end-users can access the functionalities it offers.

Continuous Monitoring

Continuous monitoring provides an automated process to monitor and detect security threats and compliance issues at different phases of the DevOps process. The automated system in DevOps provides feedback to the operation and development teams.

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Let’s Wrap UpDevOps is an efficient and collaborative approach that ensures quick and reliable delivery of software. The boom in the healthcare sector requires an efficient and reliable IT setup to ensure seamless accessibility of their digital solutions. DevOps speed up the healthcare software development process and help organizations build better digital products.Healthcare businesses can implement DevOps to leverage benefits like automation, CI/CD workflow, better collaboration between the development and operation teams, and more. DevOps in healthcare bring the pace and reliability that hospitals need to manage their patient-related services.If you need an experienced technology partner for DevOps implementation services, you can choose Radixweb. We can help you implement the DevOps model into your healthcare organization with the right set of tools and technologies.You can hire DevOps experts to guide you with your healthcare IT services and ensure seamless delivery of your digital solutions. We are a reliable technology partner with more than decades of experience in the software industry.