What Should you Ask a Potential Health Tech Development Partner?

The Health Tech space is one of the hottest in tech now with record levels of investment and a huge amount of public interest. The COVID-19 Pandemic has accelerated digital health trends and brought a welcome focus on health tech companies across the globe.

However, the record levels of investment coupled with the nationwide shortage of high-quality software developers has created a problem for health tech companies. How can they scale up their product development when they can’t find enough talent? This conundrum has led companies to look for partners who can externalize their software development. But not all health tech app development services companies are created equally. Here are three critical questions to ask any company you are considering partnering with.

1. Do you Follow the Sun?

Follow the Sun, or FTS is a software development approach which makes use of developers in different time zones to speed up development. With the FTS approach, health tech companies can expect up to 3 work-days to be delivered every 24 hours. While speed is the most obvious advantage of this approach, FTS requires a disciplined clean-code first approach which results in better, cleaner code with fewer bugs. This is because, with the FTS approach, developers must hand off their code to a new developer at the end of their workday, forcing them to hand off something that another person can easily work on. The ability to work in FTS is an indicator that your Development Partner has implemented stringent best practices and trained competent and disciplined teams. 

2. Are your teams experts on relevant regulations like HIPAA, GDPR and others?

The health tech space is one of the most regulated in the tech sector and the risks associated with even accidental non-compliance are potentially existential for a small or medium sized health tech. GDPR, which also applies to any American company which collects data from one of their customers who travels to Europe, can levy fines up to $24 Million or 4% of revenue, whichever is greater.

If you are externalizing development work, you need a trusted partner who knows the relevant regulations and helps you to follow all of them.

3. Does your team follow the Microservices architecture paradigm?

Without getting too technical, microservices architectures are particularly important in the health tech space. First, health tech companies often need to connect with various disparate systems: different insurance companies, health services, hospitals etc. Microservices make it much easier to “plug in” to these various systems, speeding up integration times and making it easier for health tech companies to enter new markets.

The second main value of microservices for health tech companies is scalability. Microservices work like a series of small APIs so if there is a bug in one, then one microservice folds under the workload, not the entire application. The best non-technical analogy is a modern cargo ship. Modern cargo ships have a series of different cells below their waterline. Each cell is watertight, so if the ship hits a rock, then water will fill that cell where the leak occurred, but it won’t flood the rest of the ship.

Health tech truly is one of the most exciting areas in tech today and there are lots of potential partners out there for health tech companies. The key to finding the right one for you, is knowing what questions to ask!