Buy vs Build: How to Plan Healthcare Software Architecture?

With the emergence of digital health and telemedicine, software is assuming an increasingly pivotal role in enhancing both the patient and clinician experience within the healthcare domain.

For corporate leaders, an array of decisions awaits regarding the design, construction, and upkeep of healthcare software:

• Should internal tech teams handle the work, or should an external services provider be engaged?
• Is it wise to invest in medical software design to distinguish one's product, or is it preferable to initiate a product launch using low-code Software as a Service (SaaS) platforms for digital health?

There exists no universally applicable approach. In reality, for most companies, the solution lies in a hybrid amalgamation of these strategies. The key lies in comprehending the factors that influence a digital product roadmap and adopting a holistic perspective rather than diving straight into the assessment of specific solutions.

This guide delineates our perspective on the "build vs. buy" conundrum and how we furnish support to healthcare enterprises by devising a technology roadmap that impeccably suits their distinct requisites and priorities.

Crafting Healthcare Software Systems

What is the role of technology in delivering value to patients?

Establishing an appropriate healthcare software strategy mandates a clear understanding of the part played by digital technology in the overall patient experience. While digital health technology can facilitate care delivery and create an exemplary patient journey, the software itself isn't the core product on sale.

Consequently, unlike software companies, most care delivery organizations don't invest heavily in in-house technical teams. Upon collaborating with a new client, inVerita's initial step involves grasping the health organization's distinctive value proposition and identifying where technology confers a competitive edge. This process commences with product discovery—a sequence of design thinking and technical workshops aimed at aligning the desired user experience and business priorities, encompassing budget constraints, scalability urgency, potential partnerships, and security prerequisites.

Pioneering Product Discovery

Product discovery involves thoroughly exploring the vision of the product, understanding how it will be used, what it can do, and figuring out the best technology tools to make it work well. One important part of this discovery is finding out what parts of the product can be done using existing digital health tools from other companies and also finding areas where we need to create something unique to make the product special.

To start this discovery, we have workshops where we listen to the experiences of patients and make sure we understand what they need and want. We also study how different groups of users will use the product and what they'll need from it. If we need more information, we might do extra research to find out where people are struggling or where there are gaps in existing health technology.

After that, our teams work together to take all this information and decide on the most important things the product should do. We create detailed stories or plans for how the product will work for users. This helps us plan out how the software should be designed. We might even make simple drawings to show how users will interact with the product.

Once we're sure about the stories and what the product will do, we sort out these tasks into different categories based on what they do and how they work together. We also think about things like how different parts of the software will connect, how much we can customize it, and how easy it will be to make it bigger and better in the future.

Some functional areas and components could fall into:

• Workflow management
• Intake and onboarding
• Scheduling and availability
• In-app video consults
• SMS or email reminders
• ePrescriptions
• Charting
• Patient education resources

Assessing Third-Party SaaS Solutions

At inVerita , we are really good at coming up with new ideas and making healthcare software. However, we don't believe in starting from scratch every time. There are already many useful digital health tools made by other companies. These tools can help us do specific things in our software more easily and quickly. The important thing is to understand all the different tools available and see if they fit with our overall plan.

We look at these third-party tools using a special chart that compares their features. This chart helps us see how well each tool does what we need. We compare these tools to the important things we decided earlier. We also look at things that are not about the tool's main job, like how secure it is or how easy it is to connect to other tools.

So, we want to make sure we're using the right tools to help us build the best software for you.

• Security and compliance requisites: Do solutions proffer requisite security levels for potential business partnerships? This might involve entering a Business Associate Agreement (BAA) with clients or attaining HITRUST certification.
• Interoperability capabilities: Given the data exchange across various segments of a software system, comprehending data formats and identifying areas necessitating manual standardization is vital.
• Technical specifications: Teams review API documentation to attain a comprehensive grasp of product capabilities and the technical specifics essential for implementation and integration.
• Customization potential: While no-code tools expedite the initiation, numerous organizations eventually outgrow solutions that lack satisfactory customization or branding options.
• Community and vendor support: SaaS vendors extend varying levels of support, often correlated with subscription tiers or payment models. Appreciating the nature of this support is pivotal, particularly if software glitches could significantly impact system and organizational performance.
• Pricing: Third-party software holds appeal due to cost savings in contrast to constructing bespoke applications or features. However, dissecting the pricing model and comprehending how costs scale with business growth is equally imperative.
• Business stability: Incorporating fresh external software components introduces an element of risk into a software system. In scenarios where product issues surface, or in the worst-case scenario, the SaaS company encounters difficulties, gauging the potential disruption in substituting that system component is vital. Recent instances of startup failures within the digital health sphere underscore the necessity for business leaders to judiciously assess confidence in third-party entities before anchoring a system heavily reliant on a single market solution.

The special chart we use helps our team members compare the good parts and the not-so-good parts of each outside tool we might use. This chart also helps us predict how much work it will take to make everything work perfectly. By looking at all of this, we can figure out the best software solution for healthcare. We can also decide how much we should use ready-made tools versus making our own things from scratch.

Evaluations & Workshops

With our detailed chart ready, inVerita creates a bunch of questions to ask the companies whose tools we're looking into. We do special meetings, where we might ask about how their tools work, check real-life examples, and pretend situations that could happen in a real business.

During these meetings, we also figure out how much it might cost to keep using these tools in the long run. This is more than just paying to use them. We also think about how many people we'll need on our team and what skills they should have to keep everything running smoothly and make improvements over time.

Ultimate Recommendation

At the end of our investigation, inVerita gives suggestions based on all the information we gathered. We design a plan for how the software should work, which includes using some outside tools that fit well. We also look at how much it might cost to run this plan, the good things, and not-so-good things about each part, and important things about the companies behind these tools.

Usually, we make a clear picture showing how everything fits together. This helps everyone understand how each piece works and how they all make the software better.

The healthcare world in the U.S. is quite complicated, and so are the software systems supporting it. Smart teams like inVerita can help companies create systems that can easily change and grow. We like working with digital health solutions that want to create new and better things for the future, instead of just copying what's already there. If you're interested in talking about how to plan, design, and make healthcare software that helps people, we'd love to hear from you!

❗️For more information let's have a video call 📞

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