Challenges in Healthcare and Pharma IT Projects

The healthcare and pharmaceutical industries have specific demands when it comes to IT projects. Meeting those demands is a challenge for developers—a challenge that requires in-depth industry knowledge and experience. And, of course, a suitable framework to work in.

Laravel supports our developers invaluably in utilizing their skills, helping them deliver comprehensive IT solutions.

Now let’s take a closer look at the challenges.

Challenge #1: Authorization

Web applications for the pharma and healthcare industries usually aren’t available to the public.

Restricted user access is a standard safety measure here. These applications are used by patients, doctors, sales representatives, administrators, or training teams. Access restriction is enforced mainly because of sensitive data processing (remember about GDPR), but also medical privacy, patent rights, or trade secrets.

That’s why when working on projects with strict safety requirements, we put great emphasis on security measures, safety management, and sharing functionalities of various kinds of documentation, analyses, and reports.

Laravel has a built-in authorization module (policies and gates), which is especially important when defining access rights to various users. Additionally, when needing authorization for this API, Laravel makes it easier by using Laravel Passport. Laravel Passport lets developers implement a full OAuth2 server within minutes, thus equipping the system with a stable and solid security protocol.

Use Case Example for Authorization Modules

Let’s imagine a web application for a pharmaceutical company. During marketing campaigns, to promote medical products, sales teams organize online meetings for doctors. For marketing purposes, the doctors need limited access to the system to see only the necessary information about a particular pharmaceutical product. The authorization module has to be properly configured to ensure that unauthorized users don’t get full access to the web application.

Organizing online meetings via web apps also requires functionalities for sending acceptance, notification, and reminder emails. Such actions are executed via cron—a task scheduler that sends all requests to the server. In Laravel, there’s a special tool for managing cron tasks, The Scheduler. The Scheduler lets users easily add, delete, or configure tasks. For curious minds, here’s more about cron and scheduling.

In web applications where security is paramount, it’s also important to monitor user access through reports that aggregate access data from the registration, meetings, etc. These reports can be automatically generated by the server through a cron request.

Challenge #2: Communicating Across Time Zones

The pharma and healthcare industries often have international reach. To communicate efficiently across time zones it’s imperative to take into account different time zones of all users when scheduling meetings or calls.

Laravel’s Carbon package helps manage the date and time in PHP in a much easier and more intuitive manner. Carbon package makes the code more readable and easier to maintain. As a result, in a web application, the time zone coordination is never an issue.

Importance of Web Frameworks for Industry-Specific Projects

By looking at the two challenges above, you can see that the choice of a framework can have a great impact on successful project delivery within a specific industry. Moreover, some of the solutions a project needs are already available within the framework, just waiting to be utilized.

Laravel is full of useful solutions that satisfy requirements of various industries, not only healthcare or pharma. One of the most valuable assets of Laravel is its systematic development.

In the newest release:

• all Symfony components have been updated to Symfony 4.0.
• Argon2, an award-winning password hashing algorithm, is the standard now
• Bootstrap 4 acts as the new frontend preset

The above is just a small preview of all the functionalities available in Laravel 5.6.

Why and When to Choose Laravel

The pleasure and simplicity of working in Laravel stem from the fact that when solving business issues, Laravel supports the developers by delivering ready-made, out-of-the-box tools. Many of those features can be used in building web apps for multiple other industries that, too, have their specific demands.

Of course, in some projects choosing Laravel isn’t necessary. A web framework is just a tool allowing developers to create. When working on smaller apps, Laravel might simply be too robust a framework.

Here are some of the alternatives that can be used in various projects:

Symfony 4

Zend Framework

Rails

Angular

Vue.js

So the lesson I have for you today is, always choose a solution suitable for the project and avoid using the same tool for all projects 🙂 There are now so many frameworks and tools worthy of developer attention that many of them are almost tailor-made to be used for industry-specific projects.

Polcode is an international full-cycle software house with over 1,300 completed projects. Propelled by passion and ambition, we’ve coded for over 800 businesses across the globe. Have an interesting project in mind? Contact us. We’ll help you get your idea off the ground.