Despite Thomas Edison suffering 10,000 failures before creating an incandescent light bulb design that worked, creating the bulb itself was the easy part. The greater challenge was bringing electricity to homes across America so there was a way to power those light bulbs.
The current explosion of healthcare apps brings up a similar issue. Market intelligence firm Global Industry Analysis, Inc. is predicting the global market for mobile apps for healthcare professionals alone will reach $14 billion by 2020. Clearly there is demand. Yet the limiting factor in getting these potentially life-saving (and cost-reducing) apps into the hands of those who need them is how quickly they can be deployed in the field.
Imagine if every light bulb manufacturer had to build its own electrical grid to power its products in America’s homes. And every time improvements were made to the light bulb, significant changes to the grid would be required as well.
That’s the situation healthcare app developers face. They not only must create and make improvements to their apps, they must also build the development, testing, and production environments for those apps. This includes implementing and maintaining hardware, an operating system, security, and everything else that goes along with traditional app development.
By Matt Ferrari, Chief Technology Officer, ClearDATA
Despite Thomas Edison suffering 10,000 failures before creating an incandescent light bulb design that worked, creating the bulb itself was the easy part. The greater challenge was bringing electricity to homes across America so there was a way to power those light bulbs.
The current explosion of healthcare apps brings up a similar issue. Market intelligence firm Global Industry Analysis, Inc. is predicting the global market for mobile apps for healthcare professionals alone will reach $14 billion by 2020. Clearly there is demand. Yet the limiting factor in getting these potentially life-saving (and cost-reducing) apps into the hands of those who need them is how quickly they can be deployed in the field.
Imagine if every light bulb manufacturer had to build its own electrical grid to power its products in America’s homes. And every time improvements were made to the light bulb, significant changes to the grid would be required as well.
That’s the situation healthcare app developers face. They not only must create and make improvements to their apps, they must also build the development, testing, and production environments for those apps. This includes implementing and maintaining hardware, an operating system, security, and everything else that goes along with traditional app development.
Of course, the move from testing to production rarely goes as planned. There is more work involved in tweaking the app to get it to perform properly and, as upgrades are made, the entire process is repeated. It’s no wonder it can take weeks or even months to take an app from “finished” to “deployed,” and even more months to make an upgrade. It’s also costly as a great number of resources are focused on building and maintaining those environments (which add no value) rather than the key differentiator for the organization — the app itself.
Shedding Light On Containers
This is why many organizations are beginning to replace the traditional approach to app development with a new methodology called containers. A container is essentially an “app-sized” cloud that, if offered by a top-tier cloud services provider, can be outfitted with everything needed to isolate, host, and secure an app. For healthcare apps that transmit, process, or store protected health information (PHI), this should include an extra layer of system tooling and security that meets or exceeds Health Information Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) compliance requirements.
Now developers can launch their apps in an environment that, as the name implies, is completely self-contained. All the work is performed in a single module which can then be moved and deployed as a whole anywhere you choose, such as on the Amazon ECS platform.
If you decide to run it somewhere else later, you simply move the entire container and re-deploy it as a unit. It runs the same way no matter what platform you use.
Choosing The Right “Container as a Service”
Keeping in mind healthcare apps will likely be dealing with sensitive PHI, it is important to note containers on their own do not assure fortress-like security. Because so many healthcare organizations are strapped for adequate IT resources, many are turning to cloud services partners to host and secure containers, but take note that expertise among these vendors varies widely.
Look for one that is healthcare-exclusive, can easily manage this industry’s demanding security needs, and prove that it is meeting — indeed, exceeding — HIPAA guidelines. To that end, the cloud services partner should be able to provide you with a mechanism to visibly monitor real-time HIPAA compliance via a “Container Compliance Dashboard.” If this partner also offers a diverse set of DevOps automation tools, you can literally deploy a new container in 30 seconds or less. It’s like flipping a switch.
Compare that to the weeks or months normally required to provision the infrastructure before the app can be operating at full capacity in the field. Whether you are building the app to sell to customers or creating it for your own internal use, you begin reaping the benefits almost immediately.
Containers also deliver significant cost savings over traditional app deployments. For example, just as you only pay for electricity when you are using it, healthcare organizations only pay the service fee when the application is actually running. The sole data and storage costs are those required by the container since no additional space is required for an external operating system or other functions. The lack of an external operating system to run the application also eliminates the costs associated with managing, securing, and maintaining this outside layer.
The net result is app developers and IT administrators can focus on writing code and accelerating their healthcare business rather than maintaining a secure infrastructure, eliminating a significant barrier to healthcare innovation.
Shine Brightly
In a dynamic and demanding healthcare app market, spending additional time on building a separate infrastructure to run it is not just wasteful. It’s unnecessary. Containers — managed and secured by the right cloud services vendor — can help you focus your efforts where they belong, on the app itself. It’s a concept that’s tailor-made for healthcare’s brightest innovators.
To learn more or see a demo, stop by ClearDATA’s HIMSS booth #3222.
