Containers In The Cloud: A Bright Idea For Mobile Healthcare Apps

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.