Systems | Development | Analytics | API | Testing

Improving patient care is right up there with the importance of optimizing the allocation and efficiency of precious resources when it comes to today’s healthcare. But that’s been difficult for people alone to accomplish, even with automation. The good news is that machine learning is now addressing these challenges and a company called Iodine Software is leading the innovation.

Gaps in patient healthcare, ranging from access and affordability, to those specific to race, gender, age and beyond, are widening across the US and leading to a variety of detrimental results for people, the healthcare system, and the economy itself. Such ongoing disparities are slowing the country’s ability to achieve population health and accounting for billions of dollars in unnecessary health care spending annually.

The healthcare industry is beginning to digitally transform with its adoption of continuously advancing technologies. Healthcare organizations are moving toward a more connected and collaborative healthcare ecosystem for improving the way they provide care. Any data-driven organization knows the importance of high-quality data pipelines in data science. The large amounts of heterogeneous healthcare data, call for healthcare organizations to adopt data-driven approaches to automate medical workflows.

Growing concerns surrounding medical device security are increasing across the globe. In the U.S., new legislation is being introduced due to the increasing number of connected devices and a cyberattack’s ability to disrupt patient care. On June 8, 2022, the U.S. House of Representatives passed bill, H.R. 7667, which in addition to several other items, is meant to address the cybersecurity of medical devices.

Digital therapeutics (DTx) companies provide software-backed therapeutic interventions to help prevent, manage, or treat a medical disorder or disease. For example, health tech unicorn Hinge Health partners advanced wearable sensors, mobile applications, and a clinical care team to enable digital physical therapy for elective musculoskeletal (MSK) surgeries, driving lower costs and a reduction in medical claims.

Inspired by an article from Jim Dempsey, lecturer at the UC Berkeley Law School and a senior policy advisor at the Stanford Cyber Policy Center, I decided to write about the recent legislation approved by the U.S. House of Representatives to address cybersecurity for medical devices and how it relates to open source software security, secure code standards, and static analysis.

As the rapid digitization of healthcare grows, telehealth apps face a unique challenge in delivering continuous care on familiar devices. The demand for telehealth apps only compounds the need for healthcare software testing to ensure a great user experience while scaling quickly and efficiently. Partnering with a crowdsourced testing vendor opens up immediate access to coverage for devices and locations, accelerated testing velocity, zero operational overhead, and increased ROI.