Delivering adaptable tools for a medical devices company, year after year

The needs of every team and company change over time. One of the implied value propositions of software is that it is soft—it can be changed without the significant effort required to change its ever-vital counterpart, hardware. But if software is developed carelessly, it can easily become cost-prohibitive to change. That’s how teams get stuck using software tools developed in the 80s for their vastly different workflows in 2024.

For the past several years, Stackfound has developed and supported a suite of web and backend applications that help a medical device team streamline their R&D and manufacturing processes. When we first started working with MediDevices (we’ll use this pseudonym to honor the team’s privacy), they relied on a lot of manual data fetching, one-off spreadsheets custom to each team member, and many other inefficient and error-prone workflows. MediDevices first came to us for help with a particular application but gained a long-term partner that continuously evaluates their processes and delivers adaptable and low-maintenance software tools catered exactly to their changing needs.

The Challenge

The MediDevices team faced a common challenge for many technology teams: they needed to invest in tooling that would increase the efficiency of their existing R&D and manufacturing processes while recognizing that these processes were likely to change rapidly. They needed a software partner that could develop and adjust tooling in pace with their ambitious product development goals while maintaining cost efficiency.

Our Approach

A solid foundation is key to enabling continuous innovation. Before diving into new developments for MediDevices, we focused on improving the robustness of their existing systems. This strategic approach enabled developers from both of our teams to spend less time on support and bug fix tasks and more time creating value-added features and enhancements. Here’s how we achieved this transformation:

Serverless Architecture Migration

We migrated MediDevices’ applications to serverless architectures on AWS to reduce development time required for managing hardware resources. We deployed code that was running on dedicated servers to AWS Lambda. This enabled their applications to automatically scale in real-time to meet changing demand, optimizing both the user experience and hardware costs while also reducing the need for maintaining dedicated servers and their corresponding operating systems.

Secrets Management

To streamline development and support efforts, we implemented a robust secrets management system using Doppler. Doppler provides a centralized platform for managing environment variables and secrets, enhancing security and simplifying access control. This also enabled automations to rotate sensitive information on demand or on a fixed schedule. Developers no longer had to spend full days working out how to deploy fresh API keys and passwords after potential leak events. Doppler seamlessly integrates with the CI/CD pipelines we developed for the applications, ensuring that secrets are securely injected into the runtime environment without manual intervention. This reduces the likelihood of human error in deployments, meaning each deployment can be done faster, with greater confidence.

CI/CD Pipelines

The CI/CD pipelines we implemented made it possible to integrate and deploy new code changes without application downtime. The immediate feedback that developers get from these pipelines is invaluable—our pipelines include code linting, automated testing, and secrets detection before the actual deployments. The pipelines also support one-click rollbacks in case something goes wrong.

Enhanced Audit Logging

Understanding who changed data when and why they changed it is always helpful to developers and end-users relying on these tools. To improve the auditability of data changes, we implemented database triggers in PostgreSQL to automatically capture and log any data changes. These triggers recorded detailed information about the changes, including who made the change, what was changed, and when it was changed. We created dedicated audit tables to store the change logs, ensuring that the audit data was kept separate from the operational data. This separation made it easier to manage and query audit logs without impacting application performance.

The enhanced audit logging capabilities ensured compliance with industry regulations and standards. It also provided MediDevices with detailed audit trails that could be used for internal and external reporting, improving transparency and accountability.

The Results

All of these efforts reduced the cost and maintenance involved in MediDevices' foundational tooling. This approach enabled our team to focus development time on MediDevices' rapidly changing needs so we could deliver value-added changes and updates more quickly and for less money. The software we have continued to deliver over the years consistently makes life easier for both the R&D and the operations teams at MediDevices and enables their success in bringing valuable, life-changing products to market time and time again. We look forward to continuing our partnership with the MediDevices team and supporting their journey toward even greater success. If your team could benefit from adaptable, low-cost software tooling don’t hesistate to schedule a free consultation today or call or text us at (972) 299-0075‬. We’re here to help your team do more for less!