Why You Need to Implement
DevOps in Healthcare for
Faster and Reliable Deliveries

Healthcare is undergoing a rapid digital transformation. To stay ahead, providers need more than advanced medical equipment and skilled professionals. They need an approach to software development that provides faster, more reliable product releases. This is where DevOps comes in, a system that combines development (Dev) with operations (Ops). In an industry where every second matters, it is really important for healthcare providers to understand what DevOps is and why it matters.

Key Takeaways:

• DevOps combines development and operations teams to automate historically slow processes.
• Key benefits of adopting DevOps include faster deliveries, improved reliability, and increased scalability.
• DevOps practices help comply with regulations like HIPAA and GDPR by integrating its extension: DevSecOps (development, security, and operations).
• Implementing DevOps in healthcare requires collaboration, automation, and continuous monitoring and refining.

1. DevOps Definition

DevOps is a software engineering methodology that allows teams traditionally working in siloed roles to collaborate and coordinate as a single team. When these teams adopt DevOps practices, cultural philosophies, and tools, they speed up the software development process, automating historically slow and manual processes. This ability to merge teams gives DevOps meaning and value ⁽¹⁾,⁽²⁾.

The DevOps model often combines the following four siloed roles:

1. Development
2. Operations
3. Quality Assurance
4. Security

2. Why DevOps Matters in Healthcare

In healthcare, time and reliability add value to patient care. Inefficiencies in IT systems can delay care and lead to medical errors. For healthcare providers, implementing DevOps increases efficiency and reliability in software development. In fact, it allows them to quickly deliver better and reliable applications and services. This speed benefits both healthcare professionals and patients ⁽³⁾.

Benefits of implementing DevOps in Healthcare

• Faster Deliveries: DevOps practices like continuous integration (CI), continuous delivery (CD), and continuous deployment (also referred to as CD) help teams create seamless processes. These practices allow them to quickly release new features, patches, bug fixes, and updates ⁽²⁾.
• Enhanced Reliability: DevOps practices automate repetitive tasks while monitoring performance in real-time. By automating testing and release processes, DevOps engineers ensure every update is stable before it reaches the end user ⁽¹⁾,⁽²⁾.
• Better Compliance and Security: Healthcare is a highly regulated industry that requires strict security measures to ensure patient data privacy. With DevOps projects emphasizing security in each phase of the development cycle, it becomes much easier to comply with regulations like HIPAA and GDPR ⁽³⁾.
• Increased Scalability: Agile frameworks, automation, and full-cycle software development abilities allow infrastructure to support scaling when needed. Since scaling impacts various aspects of a system, supporting a holistic approach helps to efficiently scale while managing everything from resource management to rolling out patches ⁽²⁾,⁽³⁾,⁽⁴⁾.
• Improved Collaboration: DevOps requires adopting a culture of teamwork where teams take full ownership of their DevOps projects and combine their workflows. This improves efficiency and saves time ⁽¹⁾.

3. How DevOps Works in Healthcare

The sign of a healthy DevOps culture is a seamless collaboration between teams. Adopting DevOps means both technical teams and medical experts work together to develop software systems. This collaboration often results in software that meets the actual needs of healthcare professionals and patients ⁽³⁾.

DevOps engineers, software developers, and IT staff generally work together as a single team by sharing their DevOps processes and taking responsibility for other lifecycle phases. They collaborate from planning to deployment and monitoring. They also use a feedback loop that helps teams learn from errors and improve continuously. This ensures that the applications teams build and maintain high security and quality standards throughout the software life cycle ⁽¹⁾,⁽²⁾,⁽⁴⁾.

4. Key DevOps Tools and Certifications

Healthcare organizations need the right tools and certified professionals to successfully adopt a DevOps model. DevOps tools like Git, Jenkins, Docker, and Kubernetes help automate, standardize, and speed up the development process. These tools also help with resource management and scaling, which are critical in healthcare, especially during unexpected patient surges ⁽⁵⁾,⁽⁶⁾.

Having a DevOps certification helps healthcare IT staff gain the skills needed to support DevOps practices. Certifications like AWS Certified DevOps Engineer or Azure DevOps Expert help them understand best practices and stay current with industry standards. Certified DevOps engineers can lead projects that are faster and more reliable, which ultimately benefits patient care and safety ⁽⁷⁾.

5. Steps to Implement DevOps in Healthcare

• Planning: Ideate, define, and describe the software you plan to build. Assess your development and operational activities to ensure they align with DevOps principles.
• Start Small: Begin with a pilot DevOps project or an existing software tool. Aim for a non-critical system to test the waters.
• Automate: Use DevOps tools to automate repetitive tasks like testing and deployment, freeing up the team to provide services and deliver applications at high velocity.
• Training: Bring certified DevOps experts on board, or enroll your team in DevOps certification programs.

Continuous Monitoring: Monitor key performance indicators like deployment frequency, lead time for changes, and system reliability to evaluate the effectiveness of DevOps.

Take the Next Step with IT Medical

Ready to transform your healthcare IT infrastructure with DevOps Services? IT Medical can help you create faster, more reliable software solutions fully integrating DevOps principles.

Our certified experts will collaborate and coordinate with your team throughout the entire DevOps journey—product life cycle. Let IT Medical guide you through adopting the best DevOps tools and practices to speed up the software delivery process.

Contact IT Medical today to learn how we can enhance your software development process and take your healthcare services to the next level. Let’s work together to deliver the highest quality care that your patients deserve.

References

1. Leite, L., Rocha, C., Kon, F., Milojicic, D., & Meirelles, P. (2019). A Survey of DevOps Concepts and Challenges. ACM Computing Surveys (CSUR), 52, 1 – 35.

2. Dileepkumar, S. R., & Mathew, J. (2023, April). Enhancing DevOps and Continuous Integration in Software Engineering: A Comprehensive Approach. In 2023 Second International Conference on Electrical, Electronics, Information and Communication Technologies (ICEEICT) (pp. 01-05). IEEE.

3. Akinola, O. A., Oyerinde, O., & Akinola, A. (2024). Implementation of DevOps in healthcare systems. Journal of Artificial Intelligence General science (JAIGS) ISSN: 3006-4023, 2(1), 217-227.

4. Perera, P., Silva, R., & Perera, I. (2017). Improve software quality through practicing DevOps. In 2017 seventeenth international conference on advances in ICT for emerging regions (ICTer) (pp. 1-6). IEEE.

5. Chen, T., & Suo, H. (2022). Design and Practice of DevOps Platform via Cloud Native Technology. In 2022 IEEE 13th International Conference on Software Engineering and Service Science (ICSESS) (pp. 297-300). IEEE.

6. Shah, J., Dubaria, D., & Widhalm, J. (2018, November). A Survey of DevOps tools for Networking. In 2018 9th IEEE Annual Ubiquitous Computing, Electronics & Mobile Communication Conference (UEMCON) (pp. 185-188). IEEE.

7. Machiraju, S., Gaurav, S., Machiraju, S., & Gaurav, S. (2018). DevOps for Azure. DevOps for Azure Applications: Deploy Web Applications on Azure, 1-9.