Unfortunately, most business leaders find out why DevOps is important the hard way.
Like when you get a huge amount of publicity and surge of new visitors to your site, only to have things collapse under the sudden load. Instead of impressing a slew of new visitors — and potentially converting them to longtime users — you disappoint them with a blank server-error page. Not only do you lose the opportunity, you make anyone who remembers the experience less likely to click the next time.
Getting to the ideation process in the double diamond method of design thinking starts to dial up the excitement. By this step, you have had a whole team of different subject matter experts soaking in the details of the user. You all have a clear picture of who you are building for and what problems they are facing.
Now you get to invent things.
Getting a development team in the user’s headspace is half the battle toward good software design. In the double diamond method, we discussed the value of finding out what problem a user is facing before trying to build something. A product without a clear pain point to alleviate will have trouble finding an audience.
Defining a problem statement puts you on the path to building something people will use. As your team continues on the next convergent and divergent paths of the double diamond, you will use this problem statement as the guidepost for your users’ point of view. One of the best ways to help define the problem statement is by building an empathy map.
Healthcare tech solutions often don’t need to reach the most users to make a meaningful impact. They just need to make lives better. Smaller audiences don’t necessarily mean smaller profits for those that invest in healthcare technology — it just means the rules for navigating it can be different than the usual startup playbook.
Healthcare tech solutions tend to take longer to come to fruition than other industries, for example. It can be a tricky channel to navigate digital upgrades due to the red tape and regulations in the medical world. Still, most healthcare companies are working toward digital solutions to streamline the varied pain points their customers have.
At Table XI, we work to learn everything we can about the businesses we work with. In healthcare, that means talking to industry leaders about how they approach technology, and how consultants like us can work best with them. Dr. Elif Oker — senior healthcare executive, Blue Cross Blue Shield alum and founder of InSun Solutions, a health care and technology advisory focused on increasing the success rate of healthcare tech — walked us through her perspective on how healthcare and software can come together.
When we started experimenting with Docker and Kubernetes, we were just looking for a more efficient way to stand up our applications. Traditionally, it’s an infrastructure or operations team’s responsibility to make sure every dependency an application needs to run is set up the server, and that none of them are in conflict — and then continue to ensure that throughout the life of the system. It’s also their responsibility to figure out which server the application need to go on in the first place.
It’s weird to call a process a perk, but our focus on reusable code is one of my favorite things about working at Table XI. Limiting ourselves to the absolute fewest number of components to build software is a challenge, and it’s one that’s made me a better developer.
Infrastructure is the framework running under your entire business — so it only makes sense that an infrastructure audit would look at the whole picture. If your infrastructure touches your email, applications, timesheets, employee communication and anything else, the audit should as well.
Every industry has a human element, but designing for healthcare means understanding that connection is the heart of medicine. All the new medicines and advancing technologies in healthcare mean nothing without the interactions between doctors and patients. When a person walks in complaining of an ache or pain, it’s the doctor’s job to use their knowledge and intuition to tease out details and offer a diagnosis. That process is intrinsic to the profession, and it’s why the doctor-patient relationship is so sacred.
It’s also the same process we use when building software for healthcare providers.
If you’ve been working in medicine for decades, it can be a bit of a shock when all of the sudden you’re tasked with building software for healthcare providers. It’s an entirely new discipline, with different possibilities, different norms, even a different language.
The truth, though, is that the best hospital software starts with you.
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