Cost-Efficient Healthcare Software Development: To Outsource or To Hire?
Healthcare software development is one of the most thriving industries today. Whether we like it or not, a plethora of apps like fitness tracking, clinical assistance apps, and telehealth apps have intertwined with our lives at a core level. The primary goal is to provide quality healthcare services to patients and healthcare care professionals.
The need for healthcare software product development is tremendously increasing each day, and healthcare institutions, along with custom healthcare software development companies, are changing the facets of the industry. According to a forecast by Statista, the global digital health market size will reach 660 billion dollars by 2025, with an expected CAGR of 25% from 2019.
Suppose you are researching custom healthcare software development solutions. In that case, you need to follow a structured checklist to understand why you’re developing the app, how it will help your institution, medical staff, and patients, what problems it will solve, how to estimate the software development cost, and what technologies it is based on.
Post gathering the answers to the above questions, there stands one major question that every startup or institution comes across — choosing between in-house development or outsourcing. While both the aspects have their pros and cons, choosing among the two entirely depends on its requirements. Some organizations prefer in-house development, while others resort to outsourcing development.
However, to assist you in making the right decision for your organization, we will help you understand which model is right for your business.
Outsourcing Software Development: How Does it Work?
Software outsourcing is the process of delegating tasks to a third-party vendor. In the case of a custom software development company, the outsourced company handles the entire project, right from analyzing the requirements to deploying the software. Generally, a project manager acts as the specific point of contact (SPOC) between the contractor team and the customer for communication.
The project manager understands the requirements, discusses issues, distributes tasks, monitors the scrum, and is responsible for the successful delivery of the project. Outsourcing healthcare app development comes up with various benefits. A few of the pros are shared below:
Rapid Start
The ability to quickly begin working on the project is one of the main advantages. The execution of IT tasks such as app design and development can be immediately taken care of by the outsourcing company with a ready-made team of experts. All you need to do is hire and tell your business requirements, and the team can get started with phase 1 of the software development process.
The Pool of Experts
Outsourcing enables you to work with highly qualified professionals from the city or country where your business is located and anywhere across the world. Outsourcing ensures access to a pool of experts that you can hire for your project. You can qualify different teams based on their unique skill sets.
Reducing Risks
Outsourcing a software development company for your project gives you an upper hand as you can authenticate successful projects delivered by the companies. You can check out and compare multiple outsourcing companies regarding price and delivery timeline. It mitigates the risks of having a failed project at the end of the line.
Time-Saving
Outsourcing saves ample time for your company as the contractor carries out the team selection, the division of the overall responsibilities, and managing software development processes and payment models. Also, you can ask the team to build an MVP and validate it to know how the end product will perform.
Cost-Efficient
No wonder outsourcing software development is highly cost-effective compared to hiring a team of experts. You can plan your budget and can discuss the same with your management team and cross-team as the outsourced software development team does not occupy your office assets and does not involve other spending areas associated with in-house development, saving a considerable chunk of money.
Now, let’s discuss the cons of outsourcing healthcare software application development.
Communication barrier
Due to time or cultural differences, it may be challenging to establish a smooth communication mode. When your outsourcing team is working, that has a severe time difference, and without proper communication channels, the effectiveness of a project can suffer. For example, an Asian-based company will have a time difference and language barrier when working with a Russia-based software company.
To mitigate the communication barrier, you can always opt for custom software development companies in the US.
Data confidentiality
While working with third-party vendors, there always stands a risk of data breaches or other security issues. Your healthcare data is crucial as it may involve personal information like clinical information, payment invoices, personal information, etc. You don’t want that information to get into the wrong hands.
Before going to outsourcing custom healthcare software development companies, ensure their establishment in the market with positive reviews and comply with security standards.
Adherence to deadlines
If you are looking to hire healthcare software developers, you must know that often adherence to deadlines creates issues. The development team can underestimate the timelines and complexity of the project, requiring more time allocation and increasing the project’s overall cost.
To mitigate it, you can create milestones to track the project’s progress and manage the payments efficiently.
Cost of Software Development Outsourcing Models
The cost of outsourcing a healthcare software development company majorly depends on the three factors, namely location, experience, and length of the project.
In-house Software Development: How Does it Work?
In-house development involves hiring the required team members to work in the company. For an in-house team, you are the boss who can track and control work processes and monitor the efficiency of employees.
Setting up an in-house software development team occupies infrastructure and IT assets and involves various other costs associated with it. Let’s know the pros of In-house software development:
Streamlined delivery process
When you hire software developers, you tend to develop a better connection with them that helps facilitates smooth communication and streamline delivery processes. Moreover, the in-house team members are more accountable and involved in the entire project.
Strong communication
As the team members are working from one place, it is easy to build efficient communication channels that help make work more effective and reduce miscommunication issues. Also, if the team faces some problems, they can coordinate and resolve them in no time.
Understanding the specifics
When an in-house team works on the project, the member understands the entire business, its aspects, vision, and end goals, and acknowledges pitfalls at an early stage. It helps the team build better processes and responding mechanisms to smoothen various stages of the project.
Now, let’s take a look at the cons of in-house development:
Staff expansion
For any project, you need to board a whole team of developers, designers, quality analysts, and product managers. Setting up a separate department increases the cost of the overall project development budget.
Expert onboard
The market does not always have the necessary specialists, and even if you find an expert, they will charge higher for their services. Furthermore, finding a good specialist with specific competencies is an extensive and challenging task.
Higher price
The cost of in-house development is significantly higher than outsourcing as you need to spend your money on other aspects like infrastructure, employee benefits, training costs, and more. Also, after some time, you need to work on the appraisals of every team member.
Cost of In-House Software Development
As discussed above, the cost of in-house software development is more compared to outsourcing the project. Here are some key points that showcase the extra costs that incur:
Pay per hire
Cost per hire is the sum you invest for your project development, and the cost varies on experience, technical complexity, availability, and others. For efficient healthcare software product development, you need to integrate an agile software development approach into your development process.
IT expenses
While setting up an in-house development team, you come across additional costs like managing the IT expenses of the infrastructure, IT systems, and more.
Software licenses
Another cost that comes with building software in-house is purchasing software licenses. There could be various licenses required for ehr software development, and the company has to bear it all.
Conclusion:
Now that you’ve understood the significant differences between in-house and outsourced healthcare software development, it is imperious to say that outsourcing your healthcare software development project is highly cost-efficient. With outsourcing, you can grow your business in an unstable environment without significant risk. If you are looking out for a reliable app development partner for a cost-effective software development company, contact us.
