What Tech Stack do Healthcare Companies Use?

Technology is making history more often than the healthcare industry. But if you consider that healthcare is saving human lives, they are equal.

The greatest solution for humankind is when they work together to provide a better quality of life, making doctors’ lives easier or routine paperwork less boring. That sounds far too good, so let’s get to the practical side of it.

Healthcare applications are becoming more popular with 350 000 mHealth apps available in major app stores. That’s only mobile applications! To build the mHealth app, we need to choose the right tech stack. The following questions come up:

How do we set up medical features with backend technologies? How do top healthcare companies use AI in their work? What are successful tech stack examples in the industry? How to set up healthcare cybersecurity?

We are simple software developers, so we are interested in technologies for health tech. It’s an interesting observation that health stacks are not entirely different from other industries' tech stacks.

There are for sure more requirements for healthcare applications but the same languages, frameworks, and cloud technologies are used to build them. Let’s try to answer the questions we asked above and give tech stack examples.

What Is Health Stack?

Health stack is the backend and frontend technologies that healthcare companies use to manage their operations. So, except for clinical tasks, healthcare apps can do everything else.

Non-clinical tasks include electronic health or medical records (EHR) systems, patient portals, telemedicine platforms, practice management software, billing and claims processing systems, analytics tools, etc.

Health stack solutions have to help healthcare organizations improve their processes and improve patient care.

But to choose the right tech stack for any app, we need to consider the following factors:

• Features and functionality of the product (in our case, medical features such as patient and doctor authorization, medical records database, etc.)

• Project requirements (user quantity, device support, performance time, etc.)

• The credibility of technologies’ open-source community

• Simple scalability

• Security considerations (in medical apps, also HIPAA compliance)

• Flexibility and the possibility to go beyond standard ways

• Size and type of your project.

Every healthcare solution is unique, although the requirements for most apps will be similar. The reason is that a lot of technologies are added to the development process.

Modern Healthcare Tech Stack Components

It’s not a complete set of components a health app would need but those that are commonly used by digital health companies and healthcare providers.

• Programming Languages: Java, Python, C#, C++, JavaScript, PHP, and HTML5.

The choice of specific language would depend on the functionality you need. If the app would store and analyze large amounts of data or somehow deal with artificial intelligence, it’s wise to choose Python + Java as backend technologies and Javascript as frontend technologies.

• Operating Systems: Windows, macOS, Linux, and mobile Apple iOS or Google Android.

Here we just need to choose a trustable provider with great support. In the development process, we choose the operating system that has security features and top performance.

• Databases: MySQL, Oracle, PostgreSQL, Memcached, and MongoDB.

To choose the right database or mix a few, seek advice from a development team. They would want to know what type of data you have, the amounts, and how often it’ll be requested. Based on that, they’ll advise the capacity of the database and the provider.

• Servers: Apache server and NGINX.

These two are the most popular ones, but what’s important for us is that they’re HIPAA compliant.

Other tools that often come in handy in the healthcare industry:

• DevOps tools: GitHub, Jenkins, Selenium, Rollbar, or Bitbucket

• Business tools such as Slack, and G Suite - for communication and management

• Utilities such as Google Analytics, Stripe, or Elasticsearch - for search, analytics, and payments

• Cloud storage and hosting providers such as Amazon S3, Amazon EC2, or DigitalOcean

Now that we have the general picture of the technology stack that might be used in healthcare apps, here are practical use cases.

Tech Stack Examples

To be more precise, let’s see the technology stack of some apps developed at Incora. The 1st example is the service we provided to the doctor’s appointment app.

HealthApp used frontend technologies such as JavaScript, TypeScript, React, Antdesign, Java for the backend, and database PostgreSQL. HealthApp, with such a tech stack, allows you to make an appointment online as well as get a consultation from a doctor, nurse, or psychologist online.

The second example is different as it involved backend technologies.

For an injury management system where we set the backend and created structure and functionality, we used runtime environment Node.js, also Nest Js for backend, React.js for frontend, AWS services (AWS Lambda), and database PostgreSQL.

With the help of these technologies, Incora developed the management system that provides scheduling of appointments, management of “play status” of players, statistics and reports of all injured players, and emails for different events.

Last but not least, the development team set up a backend for patient administration service. It allows the viewing of data about insulin injections, sugar levels, etc., for patients that use specific devices that do injections.

The service was designed for doctors to manage patients and adjust treatment. The health stack included Node.js, Express.js, MySQL, React, Redux, Saga, and AWS.

Medical Standards in Different Regions

This paragraph is to remind you that most industries have standards and policies when it comes to data protection. No matter what app you want to develop, make sure the data there (especially patients’ data) is treated the right way.

One of the most common healthcare cybersecurity issues is personal data leakage. Here are 4 main regulations you need to meet:

1. Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) (USA). Any mobile health app that deals with protected health information (PHI) needs to comply with HIPAA. Only personal health apps are an exception.

2. Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act (PIPEDA) (Canada). The act sets rules to regulate any personal data usage and sharing with third parties.

3. General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) (EU). This regulation says how businesses can and cannot use personal data; any information that might identify a person, a name, email, an IP address, and so on.

4. Data Protection Act (DPA) (UK). It’s similar to GDPR in terms of rules on using and storing personal data.

The technologies that we mentioned in the article are well-known and meet the above regulations. However, be sure to check it as the consequences are unpleasant, to say the least.

Sum Up

So, let’s rewind. We've defined what a health stack is, and what factors to consider when choosing one. Also, we made a list of commonly used technology stacks and tools in the healthcare industry.

Furthermore, the tech stack examples were described to have a full picture of app functionality. And finally, we were reminded about healthcare app development standards that are a must nowadays.

To save the world, save yourself from bureaucracy, and write us to handle both tech stack and standards.