At nearly one-fifth (18.3%) of the 2021 GDP,1 it’s no surprise that the U.S. national health expenditure focuses enormous funds and efforts toward innovative improvements to patient care and processes. Major endeavors revolve around incorporating technology and digital experiences into healthcare. This is why healthcare organizations are utilizing platform engineering to fuel ongoing innovation.
Platform engineering provides a controlled way for developers to get what they need on demand—rapidly, securely, and at scale. As Gartner projects that 80% of software engineering organizations will establish platform teams by 2026,2 healthcare organizations that don’t follow suit could be at a massive disadvantage. Here are some of the key objectives that platform engineering can help healthcare organizations achieve.
Improve Care with AI
Artificial intelligence (AI) has numerous healthcare applications, from increasing diagnostic accuracy to accelerating drug discovery. Powering AI, however, requires complex infrastructure with interconnected applications, containers, and APIs. With proper infrastructure management, platform engineering can empower developers with automated workflows to ensure the applications and services they build yield the immense benefits of AI at scale.
AI can even save lives. It’s estimated that each year in the United States between 7,000 and 9,000 people die due to a medication error.3 AI-powered smart devices such as insulin pens and inhalers can more reliably and accurately regulate and track patient medicine intake.
Ensure Reliable Operations
With the proliferation of internet-connected medical devices and digitized, cloud-based billing, insurance, and procurement systems, healthcare organizations abound with targets for malicious actors. In 2021, 66% of healthcare organizations were hit by ransomware.4 Platform engineering can protect against ransomware and other cyberattacks by empowering developers to use infrastructure as code (IaC), replete with robust, baked-in security and bot prevention measures. Consistent security across these hybrid cloud systems can produce reliable, helpful, and hopefully, profitable healthcare operations.
Empowering Telemedicine Experiences
In 2021, 37% of adults in the United States used telemedicine.5 To experience the convenience of telemedicine, patients must input sensitive insurance and payment information and converse with a medical professional over a web application with a high-definition video connection. By erecting web application firewalls (WAFs) for telemedicine applications and APIs, platform engineering can authorize rulesets to verify patient credentials, secure financial transactions from threats, and block bots that may throttle bandwidth.
Enhance patient care and healthcare processes with F5 and AWS
With F5 solutions, platform engineering can optimize AWS environments with the security and reliability required for modern healthcare. F5 helps healthcare organizations to:
- Operate reliable edge-to-cluster connectivity for AI with F5 NGINX
- Thwart cyberattacks with F5 Distributed Cloud Services
- Enable secure and effective telemedicine with F5 Advanced WAF
F5 solutions empower platform engineering to facilitate the development of AWS applications and services that improve patient experience and generate revenue. With AWS-validated competencies in security, level 1 MSSP, containers, and networking, F5 enhances cloud-native security to accelerate process and care innovation in healthcare.
Available in the AWS Marketplace, F5 solutions offer the broadest set of performance and security services with flexible commercial models for a fast time to value.
Sources:
1 Center for Medicare & Medicaid Services, NHE Fact Sheet, December 2022
2 Gartner, What Is Platform Engineering?, October 2022
3 National Library of Medicine, Medication Dispensing Errors and Prevention, July 2022
4 Sophos, The State of Ransomware in Healthcare 2022, May 2022
5 CDC, Telemedicine Use Among Adults: United States, 2021, October 2022
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