from Hacker News

Ask HN: What's software engineering like in the health sector?

by gravy on 4/13/20, 5:26 AM with 2 comments

• by speedgoose on 4/13/20, 6:26 AM

  The health sector is large and big. It depends on what you want to do and where.

  If you are manipulating personal information and patients data, and perhaps storing it, it's very very different whether you are in USA or Germany for example. The local laws and rules are very different. Germany is very strict while USA isn't at all.

  In my personal experience, security and privacy are very important. The quality of service is also critical too, though the healthcare providers do have backups plans when a service is unavailable.

  In terms of technologies, it's mostly the same than everywhere else. You can't really expect to have full stack medically certified software, including the kernels, the compilers, the vms... So you usually use the software industry standards and certify your service only.

• by triyambakam on 4/13/20, 7:46 AM

  As the other poster wrote, in terms of tech it does depend. It is cliche but true for me. I have worked on a few different teams at my current company. Previously I wrote an HL7 parser and worked on data integration services, so it was very domain specific. Now I am writing frontend React, which has almost no healthcare domain technology in it. I like this flexibility. It's fun to write parsers and data integrations, but when that gets tiring it's nice to do something nearly unrelated to healthtech. Edit: We deal with lots of archaic formats and protocols but most all our code is Golang and Typescript