DevOps and the role of IT in the healthcare space
How relevant is “Ignorance is a bliss” in the healthcare industry? Well! We will catch up on this question again at the end of this article.
So, today we are talking about “DevOps and the role of IT in the healthcare space”.
I am sure we all might have forgotten our medical reports while visiting doctors at some point of time. Remember those phone calls to our moms which made her probe every corner of our rooms for those records. How many times have we returned home with the same set of medicines in the period of 3 months with no root cause detection? Imagine if we could have all of this recorded in a secured system accessible all the time. How easy and insightful can the hospital visits be!
Could we ever have imagined a few years back that there would be a system wherein we get our whole medical history with just a click? But it is the reality in today’s world enabled by devOps. How interesting it will be to know how and where the healthcare industry is leveraging Devops to revamp Healthcare infrastructure. Let’s dive deeper into the role of DevOps in the healthcare industry.
DevOps is an amalgamation of best practices, work philosophies and tools adding to organisation’s ability to deliver best product or services. While delivering solutions, Devops improves delivery speed, quality standards and effective strategies for business enhancement. This attracts good customer remarks, improves repo with customers and many more benefits attached. Due to the high level of sensitivity and paperwork involved in the healthcare industry, the role of Devops becomes more critical and tough to implement. We would not like to get into technical details of implementing DevOps as this is out of scope for this article.
“why” DevOps in healthcare?
Development of the healthcare industry was sluggish due to the humongous amount of uncluttered data. Medical history of the patient was left untraceable and unrecognisable. Data which could have empowered patients with their medical history was left unattended. Even though data analytics was introduced long back in 1961 but the real use of deriving insights from data commenced after the introduction of big data analytics in 2005.
Many big data analysis platforms like Hadoop, Xplenty or MongoDB started pulling out meaning patterns from data to encourage informed strategic decisions. This has not only improved healthcare infrastructure but also empowered patients to take informed decisions. As per Mckinsey, Research shows that organisations that follow information on customer behaviour from big data outperform its competitors by whooping 85% in sales. With so many benefits in hand how could the healthcare industry keep their hands off from utilising software tools to fine tune their organisational processes? Big giants in healthcare went ahead with giant software implementations but there was still a big challenge in the form of a big clutter of nebulous datasets scattered everywhere. Here comes DevOps at rescue!
DevOps helps in performing an audit on IT infrastructure and assessing the impediments in their IT journey. It suggests solutions which involve moving the infrastructure from legacy file based systems to cloud platforms like AWS or Azure, simultaneously creating Continuous Integration/Continuous Delivery (CI/CD) pipelines for infrastructure provisioning, managing and monitoring. This approach brings several advantages in the form of:
- Business agility
- Data accessibility
- Infrastructure efficiency
- Informed decision making
- Data security
- Enhanced customer satisfaction
- Achieving scalability
With so many advantages in hand, DevOps in healthcare still lags in adoption due to its huge structure. Healthcare companies are unsure of when and where to start, what are prerequisites, cost involved and level of reward they receive after implementation. All of these impediments can be removed by being more open to IT and commitment to service.
It is high time to adopt technology to focus on the main works of the healthcare industry that are “Treatment” and “Research”. Accepting that all administrative and data driven work can be automated and handled efficiently by IT, is the key to bloom in healthcare. Pandemics like COVID-19 which have wrecked the spinal cord of healthcare systems across countries time and again, ring alarming bells for healthcare industries to adopt innovations and technology. Ignoring the importance of healthcare revamp has led to much damage to human life and the economy in the past. Although the problem not only lies with IT infra in healthcare it’s also with an adequate number of doctors, advanced medication equipment and skills. This problem is big but can be corrected by taking one step at a time. DevOps is a great tool to start with, by revamping IT infrastructure in healthcare.
“Ignorance is a bliss” is certainly not applicable in healthcare!
