Did you know that 1 in every 5 American tracks their health statistics using an app? The healthcare industry is experiencing rapid digital transformation across practically every aspect of medical service delivery. The goal of software development for healthcare is to build a digital ecosystem where providers can increase the quality of healthcare services, deliver better treatment, and make their staff more productive. This type of technological innovation leverages the latest tech trends such as big data, machine learning, and e-health applications that all create new opportunities for improving the patient experience.

As Health records are moving towards digitalization, and the software that supports healthcare delivery has become increasingly complex, there is a need for healthcare to be able to respond in a timely manner to development that supports clinical decision-making, care delivery and administration in the midst of new environments, while maintaining compliance with regulatory agencies, has become critical. Agile methodologies offer solutions to many of these industry challenges. Let us understand how adoption of an Agile Lifecycle over the traditional Waterfall model helps in better delivery of Healthcare Software Solutions:

If your software team is used to the traditional Waterfall development process and is not familiar with Agile, these are the core elements and practices of developing using an Agile methodology – all of which can be adjusted to fit your team’s needs:

• Sprints: Sprints are the foundation of Agile. A sprint is a defined period of time where the team focuses on delivering a set of product features. Sprints can vary in duration depending on the project’s needs. We’ve found that sprints of two weeks in duration usually work well when developing healthcare software.

• Sprint Planning: Prior to the execution of a sprint, the entire team gathers to plan the activities that will occur during that sprint. The team commits to a set of user stories during sprint planning. User stories are defined as a set of requirements and acceptance criteria that define a feature or scenario from a user’s perspective. User stories are used to define how a function should work and behave.

• Sprint demonstration: At the end of every sprint, the team has an opportunity to demonstrate the work they’ve accomplished. The sprint demonstration is also an important opportunity for the product owner to provide feedback and make adjustments to the work that was delivered during the sprint. This feedback process can save healthcare organizations a lot of time and money from having to correct mistakes or make changes/improvements after a solution is delivered, as typically seen when working using Waterfall.

• Sprint retrospectives: At the end of every sprint the team gathers to review the sprint and identify areas that went well and things that could be improved upon. This allows the team to continuously review what they are doing and improve their processes.

• Daily stand-ups: These are very short daily team meetings where each team member shares what they are working on and if they are blocked. With more minds at the table comes more ideas to solve any roadblocks experienced.

• Backlog: The backlog is a list of prioritized user stories or features that details what is required to build the product. The product owner ‘owns’ the backlog, meaning that the product owner must define and prioritize all of the user stories within it. The product owner is expected to make feature trade-off decisions based on the product vision and the business needs.

• Sprint board: The sprint board is a tool used by the team to organize and express the status of the work in the current sprint. Issues are moved from one status to the next as they are being worked on.

Agile development offers significant benefits to Health-Tech Software Stakeholders. These include:

• The ability to incorporate user and stakeholder feedback early in the development cycle helps ensure that a successful product is built with the features that reflect current business needs. Agile allows suggestions to be added in earlier instead of later, when changes are more costly. This is a huge improvement over waterfall methods, where initial requirements analysis and then development can cause a gap of years between initial request for software, and the final delivery, creating “feature creep” in order to bring the product up to date. “In healthcare, things change quickly and the information environment is extremely complex,” says Schiel. Healthcare providers often don’t know exactly what they need, until you start building; or, until they get hit by a circumstance they hadn’t foreseen, and realize that they need an additional feature to deal with it. Waterfall doesn’t work at all well in this type of situation, while agile allows the flexibility to make these needed changes and updates during development.

• Development with agile is more transparent, with working features that can be demonstrated in a deployment context at the end of each sprint. Stakeholders can see visible proof of project progress, and initial testing done.

• Risk management is a large, and understandable, concern, when developing devices that can impact patient outcomes. Scrum practices are designed to allow early identification of risks. To meet quality assurance and management goals, the integrated, continuous testing that is core to the agile process (causing high-quality software development as the standard) is often supplemented with specific controls and more frequent review cycles.

Choosing to adopt agile and Scrum methodologies is helping numerous Software Teams for healthcare startups and organizations enjoy improved productivity, improved quality, and better support for healthcare delivery. Click here, to get better insights on how we utilize a Agile-Waterfall Hybrid Model