Today, there are new and mounting expectations when it comes to the health care experience. Patients want digital options for everything from appointment reminders and communications to telehealth visits and pharmacy experiences. In fact, 70% of consumers are more likely to use a provider that offers digital reminders and follow-up care.
Health care organizations with digital transformation success reap the benefits—53% of consumers are more likely to use a provider that offers telemonitoring devices. Organizations committed to DevOps, like City of Hope, have not only experienced accelerated implementation of digital strategies but also achieved massive gains in productivity while maintaining security and regulatory requirements throughout their IT transformation.
Digitalized health care services were highlighted by the pandemic in 2020. Unprecedented changes drove organizations toward an entirely new set of benefits and challenges with cloud-based computing. As of August 2021, 73% of health care organizations had adopted DevOps.
That said, unfortunately, DevOps success can be difficult to achieve. According to Gartner, “75% of DevOps initiatives will fail to meet expectations due to issues around organizational learning and change.” However, the benefits far outweigh the challenges, and with a dedicated organizational shift, DevOps benefits all—from the health care organization to the consumer.
The Benefits of DevOps in Health Care
Patient engagement skyrockets with modern conveniences like fast online check-in systems, health-related notifications, easily accessible patient portals, electronic pharmacy options and appointment availability monitoring. By automating software delivery management (via CI/CD pipelines), health care organizations deliver better features and solutions faster with higher quality and security posture—and they stay competitive in the market.
DevOps expedites the development cycle, addresses bugs and rapidly deploys updates. CI/CD pipeline automation reduces bottlenecks and alleviates unnecessary expenses. With DevOps toolchains in place, the organization optimizes performance and drives a culture of collaboration between developers, operations, security and quality teams. As organizations become more data-driven, they can outpace the competition through enhanced insights and analysis. While the benefits are clear, some organizations cite concerns over regulatory and security as reasons for not yet adopting DevOps.
DevOps for Regulatory Compliance and Security
Regulatory compliance and security are essential to highly regulated industries—including health care. While the organization must maintain industry standards, delaying DevOps adoption can be more of a disadvantage.
Regulatory agencies often pressure organizations to close security gaps and vulnerabilities fast. New software releases to address these issues can take months to complete. DevOps (and DevSecOps), however, automates the most time-consuming processes and allows the health care organization to close security gaps rapidly and effectively. Further, with a shift left approach to security (static code analysis, dynamic code analysis, threat vulnerability management, DevSecOps, etc.), security is built into the CI/CD pipeline.
When organizations leverage their DevOps approach to automate configuration changes, they can establish a repeatable and standardized process. DevOps also provides visibility across the pipeline that allows organizations to scale and monitor compliance and identify risks effectively.
Accelerate Release Velocity With DevOps
With DevOps, teams become substantially more productive and improve release velocity without sacrificing security. Better speed to market offers many advantages, especially if an organization wants to be the first to introduce a new concept or offering. It also keeps consumers satisfied with timely releases and updates.
However, better release velocity almost always requires organizational change. When process, tools and collaboration among previously siloed teams are overhauled by a DevOps transformation, release velocity has the opportunity to skyrocket. Health care organizations like City of Hope have seen significant improvements in release velocity through implementing DevOps.
How City of Hope Successfully Adopted DevOps
City of Hope, a top cancer research and treatment center, underwent a DevOps transformation starting in 2022. Like many health care organizations, City of Hope is not a software organization at its core. However, as a research organization, it owns massive amounts of data about treatments and outcomes that need to be analyzed.
To keep pace with the digitalization of the health care industry, City of Hope’s engineering team created a new software development process from scratch. It needed custom software applications for ongoing and timely data analysis in the precision medicine data and systems division.
Like many health care organizations undergoing a DevOps transformation, City of Hope encountered common challenges it had to overcome as part of the process, including siloed development, operations, security and quality teams; slow releases and approval cycles and little-to-no visibility into velocity, performance and security.
The transformation also had to be achieved without hiring DevOps engineers or consultants. Looking at the future of digitalization among health care organizations that do not consider themselves ‘traditional’ software organizations, City of Hope modernized and elevated its offering through no-code DevOps orchestration without the manual coding processes that can significantly delay an organization’s entry into the digital space.
City of Hope’s DevOps transformation helped accelerate software delivery, and a no-code approach reduced the barrier to entry for those unfamiliar with DevOps engineering. No-code DevOps orchestration rapidly improves the speed at which an organization can reach DevOps maturity and scale across all apps and business units. It removes the time-consuming coding process of the CI/CD pipeline while allowing an organization to track governance and shift left for safer software delivery.
City of Hope successfully developed a DevOps pipeline capable of being built and managed by the City of Hope IT staff.
The results were substantial, including:
- Developer productivity increased by 25%
- An 80% increase in productivity with the ability to build a holistic and integrated DevOps pipeline in 30 minutes versus 2.5 hours
- The initial pipeline was up, running and providing value in just two months
Now, City of Hope has access to real-time insights that allow the team to resolve any issues quickly. While it has documented noticeable improvements within the IT organization and the pace of software development, DevOps has notably given teams time back to do what is most important at City of Hope—deliver innovations that will help make cancer a thing of the past.
As health care organizations move toward more cloud-based offerings, they need the right combination of tools, processes, skills and a cultural shift focused on digitalization. With these in place, City of Hope successfully achieved DevOps transformation with 80% faster releases and visibility across the entire pipeline.
Gorkey Vemulapalli, senior director, precision medicine data and systems at City of Hope, contributed to this article.