In today’s development community, taking an Agile approach is becoming increasingly popular, and for good reason. Agile development can help reduce risk, boost productivity and establish a more sustainable development environment. In order to avoid failures and mistakes when becoming innovative, it’s important to have a correct software that detect missteps in time shunning extra costs.
The Agile method, allows companies to enhance this process. When utilized in specific industries, like healthcare, for example, organizations stand to reap even more advantages.
When developers use agile development for healthcare initiatives, there are numerous benefits, including:
1) Transparency: Especially in the healthcare industry, transparency is very important – not just for overall operations, but for compliance with sector guidelines as well. Agile development can help support this transparency, ensuring that key stakeholders are engaged and kept informed throughout the project.
2) Predictability: Taking an agile approach to development can also provide more predictability, particularly when it comes to the delivery schedule and cost of the project. During agile development, the team adheres to fixed iterations that limit the amount of time and work expended for each portion of the initiative. This helps keep the project on schedule and on budget.
3) Scalability: Healthcare organizations have certain scalability needs, especially related to their use of electronic medical records. Agile development can help the team create a scalable product that can support these requirements, ensuring that healthcare groups have a flexible environment in which to store and access their critical patient files. It is essential that organizations can manage big data volumes while controlling costs.
4) Agility: As its name alludes, agile development can also provide the agility healthcare groups need to adapt to changing needs or industry standards while still keeping pace with the project’s budget and schedule. In this way, if a project’s guidelines need to be adjusted, or healthcare administrators discover a new requirement that must be addressed, the team is able to easily adapt and incorporate these changes without running valuable development.
Practice Fusion, a free web-based electronic health record company, approached Making Sense in order to create a native version of its cloud-based electronic health record optimized for iOS- and Android-based tablets. We had to create an app that could be able to provide the same level as the web platform, convert components into natives and that at the same time, look nice and achieve a faster time to market. We reached our objective reducing costs in only two months work.
The mentioned case study has used and implemented Agile method to solve our clients’ business problems while maximizing the time and reducing the cost of the development process.
Overall, an agile development approach has much to offer healthcare organizations, particularly when it comes to transparency, predictability, scalability and agility. Steve Denning once said: “Agile isn’t just about better software. It’s a better way of getting anything done”.
To find out more about how your health care group can benefit from agile development, contact Making Sense today.