Healthcare providers are taking on big data projects to create an efficient ecosystem for managing their enormous datasets. However, many of them are facing delays in implementing these ambitious projects because of continuous recommendation requests exchanged between the development teams and the operations unit. Healthcare providers in favor of DevOps for big data have reached out to leading software firms, seeking a solution to reduce the deployment time and increase the frequency of software releases. To tackle this issue, the firms have recommended a shift in approach from the traditional software development life cycle (SDLC) to something new – ‘A DevOps in healthcare’ approach.
Why is the traditional SDLC causing problems?
In the traditional SDLC approach, a development team sends the project to an operations team that works fine in the development environment. However, the project may not work as expected in the production environment because of a possible mismatch in configuration between the developer and the production environments. Additionally, new development tools and languages are accelerating the process of writing the code. This creates a bottleneck at the operations end and they are not able to cope up with the frequent changes and re-releases. Developers do not interact with the production servers, which blinds them from the way their apps are behaving while running on those servers. Besides, sometimes there are no clear instructions to deploy the project from the developers’ end. In such a case, the operations team has to figure out their way to configure the project based on their previous experience, thereby risking its deployment. In general, software development cycle is suffering due to the poor transition of projects from the development to the operations phase.
How can a DevOps approach help?
The DevOps approach was conceived by Patrick Debois and aims to eliminate the gap between the development team and the operations team in achieving a faster software deployment. The approach amalgamates developer and operations team to create a DevOps team. This way, the development cycle becomes elastic and one can roll out a release as soon as a change is made. DevOps tools, like the IBM UrbanCode, deploy are in-place that help to automate the process. The automation reduces the deployment time from a few days to a few hours. The developers and the operations team work together and understand each other’s problems better than before. A faster deployment significantly helps a software improve more rapidly and succeed in general.
Why DevOps in Healthcare?
Healthcare providers are looking to accelerate their big data project deployments. These projects have a lot of different data sources ranging from EHRs (Electronic Health Records), medical devices, pharmacies, lab reports, insurance claims to wearables. All this data needs to be structured and updated in the system for effective and improved healthcare delivery. The deployment delays to traditional SDLC can significantly raise the cost and affect the overall usability of the project. DevOps in healthcare is a perfect alternative to traditional SDLC to improve and accelerate the implementation of big data tools.
An anonymous healthcare information provider approached IBM to deploy a DevOps solution for a project recently. The project structure improved considerably leading to an increased end-to-end transparency for compliance and ultimately supported faster innovation of the product. DevOps in healthcare is proving to be a revolutionary approach to enhance software development.