Agile-Waterfall Hybrid Model for Health-Tech: Best Practices

Technology is shaping every industry, regardless of the work involved! The Healthcare digitalization is one of the most important example of tech evolution across an industry that is reshaping the way we interact with healthcare professionals, share medical data or make decisions related to treatment and outcomes. This evolution in the healthcare industry can be defined by the acronym ‘Health-Tech’. According to a report with an expected CAGR of almost 25 percent from 2019 to 2025, the digital health market should reach nearly 660 billion dollars by 2025. Even before the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, which sharply increased the need for digital health tools to be used, consumers’ adoption of digital health had been steadily increasing. 42 percent of Americans reported using digital health tracking.

Some of the majorly adopted and recognized Health-Tech solutions/strategies are:

• Integrated EHR(Electronic Health Record): An electronic health record is the systematized collection of patient and population electronically stored health information in a digital format. They can be integrated with a software solution. Post inception of Covid-19, governments all over the globe have integrated EHR to keep a track of vaccinations. The U.S. government now requires EHRs for all healthcare providers that want to receive Medicare payments so the adoption rate of EHRs has escalated.

• Cloud Migration: Over the past decade, health systems and physician offices have made tremendous gains in shifting their medical record-keeping from paper to computerized systems. This shift to electronic health information and interoperability of this information, such as through the use of electronic health records (EHRs), has the potential to make care safer and more efficient and improve the patient care experience by providing timely access to health information and seamlessly coordinated care. You can find more information here(https://www.silstonegroup.com/cloud-based-ehr)

• Data Security: One of the biggest concerns all healthcare providers share is data security. HIPAA compliance requires that private information patient records be secured from theft or unauthorized access.

• Telehealth: Telehealth innovation has enabled doctors and nurses to access medical records, issue prescriptions, and perform a host of tasks from anywhere using a tablet/computer.

• Analytics: One of the benefits of applying digitizing hospital records is the data can be analyzed to identify problems or areas that can be improved. Big data is having an increasing impact on healthcare because the insight from big data analysis yields big returns. For example, hospitals are using big data to reduce patient readmissions, using analytics to identify early symptoms for heart disease and other ailments. Hospitals also are using analytics to manage staffing, control pharmaceutical storage, and for a host of other applications that result in more efficient operations.

While developing these tech-based solutions, the team needs to follow certain best practices to ensure that:

• Regulations of the healthcare industry are followed such as the HIPAA Compliance.
• Proper understanding of the user/patient type. Need to have a proper understanding on the challenges a particular group of patients/users might face while using the solution, how to tackle it, and make it easily accessible for them.

• Proper understanding of the pain points, BRD.
• Deadlines of project delivery are met.

Agile-Waterfall Hybrid Adoption:

Both Waterfall Project Management model and Agile model have their benefits and drawbacks. For a software development team developing health-tech-focused software for various use-cases, a hybrid Waterfall-Agile approach is usually recommended. In a hybrid approach, teams leverage the best aspects of both techniques with a heavier focus on agile, but enough waterfall planning to provide a clear roadmap to key stakeholders and senior leadership. This has been very successful in making sure that the product ultimately delivered is one that stakeholders are happy with and have been involved with throughout the process and it is completed in a reasonable timeframe.

While every organization and project is unique, this hybrid approach can be effectively applied to outcome improvement projects. What this might look like is having a team create a Gannt chart that shows the high-level timeline of the project, an overall breakdown of work in phases, and any dependencies that exist. This chart would then be presented to senior leadership and clinicians in order to get buyoff. For the improvement team, each phase of work would then be broken down into a more detailed set of tasks, typically applying agile principles with sprints outlined and team member commitments specified. If a team is working on developing a sepsis outcome improvement application, for example, they might set out to complete the effort in three months. The project might be broken down into three separate iterations each lasting approximately one month in duration.

To learn more on how we utilize the model and build teams for health-tech development, click here.