According to recent studies, the use of software as a service (SaaS) solutions in health care is increasing at an unprecedented pace, spanning a wide variety of applications.

Fremont, CA: Healthcare organizations are dependent on software more than ever to help them achieve better patient outcomes. Healthcare companies understand the need to speed innovation and radically rethink how they develop apps as a result of the increased use of digital products in patient care. Many engineering teams have switched to continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) while designing and delivering applications due to this.

Feature flagging is one way to speed up development and maximize product output in the healthcare sector as teams look to enhance these vital software development processes.

Feature flags are toggles or switches that allow software development teams to activate or disable features. The primary benefit of feature flagging is that it speeds up app deployment. During creation, one or more features may be programmed into the program and made ready to use, but it is switched off for the user and/or patient when it is first implemented.

The ability to insert functionality inside applications that can be toggled on and off is ideal for the healthcare industry because it allows for regulatory approval(s) before full implementation.

Adding video chat/conferencing functionality to existing applications was relatively simple in most industries. However, the approval process and privacy and security issues delayed the implementation of these features in health care. Most healthcare teams use monthly- or quarterly- deployment cycles to coordinate their deployment activities with enforcement and governance review boards. Product and technical teams aim to balance this cadence with their changes and enhancements, which can make innovation difficulties.

Teams could use feature flagging to decouple the principles of "deploy," "approve," and "release" if they wanted to deliver this capability quickly.

Although most providers concentrate solely on SaaS, the ability to launch feature flagging applications on proprietary cloud infrastructure is crucial in the healthcare sector. This model offers additional security and HIPAA compliance and critical features and performance results that SaaS-only providers fail to match. Feature flagging is well-suited to an on-premises implementation because it usually becomes deeply ingrained in the fabric of an organization's product and technology.

Implementing on-premises feature flagging is a perfect way for healthcare organizations to go from monthly to regular deployment velocity. It enables their software development teams to incorporate CI/CD processes and innovate more efficiently without causing regulatory breaches or exposing sensitive data to hackers.