The control of development costs is a key issue for any health software development company. An issue that acquires special relevance in a sector that is experiencing a very rapid and very deep evolution around Digital Health and Connected Health. How to be competitive in the health software development sector while keeping costs under control? How to offer your customers the best solutions in Digital Health under an optimal and controlled cost model? Read on because in this article we tell you how to optimize your software development costs for Health with Nubentos, the API Marketplace for Health.

HAVEN’T YOU DISCOVERED APIs YET?

 

If your company or team is already familiar with the advantages of using APIs (Application Programming Interface) to quickly integrate specialized remote, fully functional and reliable functionalities in your software, you can go to the next section.

What is the point of developing something that has already been developed and is proven to work correctly?

And if they are also complex solutions, which require a high level of specialization, and imply a high risk of making mistakes with great impact?

Is it really necessary to reinvent the wheel?

Your software can have advanced Digital Health solutions that your client wants: just locate a company that provides that service through an API, and integrate it into your software.

They are solutions that are working on many products and customers, so the quality assurance is total, and they also have a highly qualified team for maintenance and evolution.

The mere fact of using third-party APIs to enrich your developments already saves your development costs. Using software already tested and with support behind is not the same as developing it from scratch and assuming the associated costs and risks.

You save costs and risks.

All right, but how to locate the provider of each advanced Digital Health solution that I want to integrate into my software? There are tens of thousands of companies worldwide with very advanced APIs. How to locate them? Through Google?

API MARKETPLACE FREE PLATFORM

 

To locate the best APIs for Health you just have to access the Nubentos API Store. The new free platform available for the entire health ecosystem, where you will find more and more advanced Digital Health solutions ready to use in your software.

But it is not just an API directory where you can download your SDKs (up to 10 SDKs available for each API, by the way). In Nubentos you will find a series of additional advantages to having the advanced Digital Health services you are looking for gathered in one place.

You will find a series of features that directly and very positively impact the management and optimization of your development costs.

Keep reading, let’s see them.

COSTS AUTOSCALING: PAY FOR USE

 

Do you have to choose usage plans based on a forecast of the use that your users will make of the software? Well, it is not a bad option (better than old licenses).

But what happens if the forecast was not perfect? What happens to your costs every month when the actual use is below that forecast? What a waste of money, don’t you think?

Pay per use introduces a key feature: cost autoscaling. The cost of the software is constantly and automatically adjusted to the actual use made of it.

Do your customers expand their staff with more healthcare professionals and therefore the number of users increases? Do your customers have less use seasons for vacations or any other circumstance? The costs are adapted to the new level of use, and as you will see, you have full control over these circumstances.

YOUR USERS CHANGE, SO DO YOUR DEVELOPMENT COSTS

 

Among your end customers there may be larger clients, which will generate more use of your software, and smaller ones, which will have less use. And usually the size of your client will be aligned with their budgets.

That is, you can deploy a version of your software prepared for higher consumption in your large customers, and another version of your software prepared for lower consumption in your medium or small customers.

For you, the only difference between both versions is that in one you will use the specific token for a higher consumption plan, in another you will use the specific token of a lower consumption plan. But technically they will be identical.

Some lines above, we mentioned that the usage level of your software may change over time in each client.

But not only the changes in the usage that may occur in each of your customers influence your costs. You will also have more and more clients, right? That means more and more uses of your software. More costs then?

Yes and no. Because your costs not only adjust to the actual use that your users make, but they also arrive when they have to arrive, and not before. That is, when you have already achieved that new client, or when you have already negotiated the price of the new version.

NO COSTS WHILE NO USE

 

When your costs increase it will be because your customers have also grown, and therefore your income.

The API Economy also allows you avoid costs for this advanced API in Digital Health, until you have put it in the hands of your current clients and new clients.

Your entire development cycle is free of additional costs. With Nubentos your costs only increase when your income has done so before.

But in addition, this allows you, for example, to offer the new functionality in a parametrized way. In this way, if your client wants to activate it, you can change the corresponding parameter to “on”. If your client wants to deactivate it, change the value to “off” and the costs are over until you activate it again.

Do you realize the importance of this model for, for example, Clinical Trials and Medical Research Projects?

MEASURE AND ADAPT YOUR COSTS

 

And how do you control all those changing circumstances that occur in your customers? How do you adapt your costs to the new customers that will arrive?

In Nubentos you have analytics that allow you to monitor the real use that your end users make of the APIs that you have integrated into your software.

Thanks to these analytics, you can identify different scenarios that affect your costs and make the right decisions:

• When the use of your API exceeds the expected thresholds, you can start incurring extra costs. It is time to change the consumption plan to a higher one that allows more consumption without those extra costs.
• When the use of your API is far from the expected thresholds, you may be incurring unnecessary costs, so it is time to switch to a lower consumption plan.

In fact, your costs may accompany your own deployment plan.

In pilot phases you can use even free or very low consumption plans (that is, very low cost).

When you are deploying your new version, perhaps with geographical criteria, or customer size, you can adapt the consumption plan you use in Nubentos and thus keep your costs under control.

CONCLUSIONS

Integrating Digital Health solutions through APIs, in a free and as complete platform as Nubentos, is a great strategic decision for your Health software development company.

You will discover solutions that you don’t even know that exist, that will increase the value of your software and your competitive advantage.

You will defer your development costs until your software reaches your end users.

You can measure and manage different consumption plans for different types of customers and different scenarios.

Your costs will always be adjusted to the actual use of your software.

In short: Nubentos helps you optimize your development costs for Health. QED.