The healthcare industry is undergoing massive amounts of change . With change come enormous pressures to improve efficiencies, increasing revenue and driving outcomes , all while remaining compliant and keeping data safe and secure. With regulations requiring value-based models of care , the adoption of electronic health records, and patients demanding improved control over and access to their personal data, the rapid adoption of technology has created complex challenges for healthcare professionals and institutions. Factors like data fragmentation and silos , difficulties communicating patient health information , and tracking payments cause more problems for doctors and takes them away from what really matters – treating their patients.
Innovation and Protecting Patient Data – both macro data as well as patient level data
At the center of healthcare’s digital transformation challenge is the issue of protecting patient data while making it seamlessly available. With each transfer of information, there is an inherent risk for a security breach or for incompatible or outdated systems to miss important data. These kinds of mistakes can have profound consequences, including stolen personal information, treatment errors, delays in treatment, or duplicative or incorrect lab requests.
The health industry traditionally has been slow to adopt modern technology platforms, but COVID has created a burning platform for Digital Health to increase opportunities for developers and technology companies to quickly introduce new innovations for healthcare. However, that doesn’t solve a key issue in some major institutions – legacy operating environments are often primitive even by “legacy” standards, which makes technology adoption such as the move to cloud and agile operations nearly impossible without a costly overhaul of ITsystems.
The DevSecOps Approach
One approach that can address this issue is DevSecOps, a software development methodology that is Deeply rooted in cultural change. It enables enterprises to accelerate digital development and ultimately reduce cost by embedding security and compliance into the development and engineering teams. This allows enterprises to integrate security processes earlier in the development lifecycle and apply practices to improve security at the source, such as automation and increased collaboration. It also addresses some of the potential threats that standard DevOps and cloud adoption implementations might not be built to address, including data breaches, software vulnerabilities or dataloss.
Healthcare enterprises need to consider disruptive improvements in their technology optimization efforts if they want to implement DevSecOps in healthcare. Business and IT leaders must be willing to make bold moves to simultaneously address the rising tide of compliance requirements and manage the mounting pressure to deliver innovative digital solutions for doctors and patients.
In many ways, using a DevSecOps approach has its roots in using Agile processes. The entire development team knows to evaluate security iteratively throughout the product lifecycle. Because the team is thorough with this aspect of creating and implementing security measures, the team can put out a final product much sooner by not leaving security testing as an afterthought. The DevSecOps approach reduce time spent on responding to threats. Also, the product’s development is structured in a way that
lets teams remedy issues at that level. Then, it advances to the next. Plus, this certainly gives them an edge over their competitors.
There is a lot of great things happening in the DevSecOps Landscape. Bringing security Security automation is key through tools like : Archery , Zap, Snyk, that monitor dependencies , leverage AI to determine smallest upgrade path to avoiding vulnerabilities , perform container inspection , look at deployable artifacts , violation of policy , extract metadata about your artifacts and publish and scan them
