Last week, our team was at the 2016 Connected Health Conference in the Washington, DC area. We met amazing people, connected with fellow innovators, and learned from healthcare trailblazers. Here are a couple takeaways from our experience.
Privacy and security can be barriers to innovation
Complying with privacy legislations like HIPAA (U.S.) and PHIPA (Ontario) require large time and resource investments. In some cases, the cost is enough to stop the project in its tracks. As Ontario Telemedicine Network CEO Ed Brown said during the Canada — US Connected Health Workshop, privacy is the most expensive thing we can do, and is a huge barrier that slows the pace of innovation.
Not only do you need ensure that your technology complies with these legislations, you also have to go through the process of completing privacy policy documentation and processes. This often involves hiring consultants and lawyers to help you through the process.
Changing your app to avoid investing in privacy and security compliance can alter your health app solution
Healthcare innovators and developers are always faced with tough challenges, one of which is balancing the cost of development with implementation of certain features. It’s a classic concept in project management: time, cost and scope represent the triple constraints, where prioritizing one or two will affect the other.
In this case, saving time and cost may lead to a smaller scope or feature set than originally planned, due to changes in handling personal health information. The intended solution may not be built due to these constraints.
What can you do?
There is no getting around HIPAA. Any app that interacts with personal health information in any way is required to comply with the legislation. However, compliance doesn’t have to be the reason why you need to choose between cost, time and scope. Security and privacy shouldn’t stop you from quickly scaling and going to market.
Using cloud-based hosting platforms like MedStack can help you minimize the time and money it takes build a HIPAA audit-ready app. Not only are our hosting capabilities completely HIPAA compliant, MedStack also provides a flexible developers toolkit. This means your development team has complete autonomy over your health app.
As we learned at Connected Health, we are moving towards connected healthcare, where new solutions and apps are built and released everyday. Healthcare innovators and developers can scale faster by using platforms such as MedStack to minimize the cost and time normally spent on security and privacy compliance. It’s exciting to watch the industry grow, and we hope to support our fellow healthcare innovators along the way.
Interested in using MedStack to host your healthcare app? Email us at info@medstack.co or connect with us on Twitter and Facebook to learn more.
