How To Accelerate MVP Software Development? Momentum’s Strategic Approach

Why speed matters in HealthTech MVPs

Ask any HealthTech founder about their development timeline, and you'll likely hear a familiar story: "We thought it would take six months, but it's been a year and we're still not live."

This isn't just frustrating—it's dangerous for your business. While you're stuck configuring AWS for HIPAA compliance or figuring out how to integrate with Epic, your competitors are already in the market, collecting user feedback, and iterating on their product.

At Momentum, we've spent years refining an approach that consistently helps our HealthTech clients launch 40% faster than industry averages. And we do it without cutting corners on compliance, security, or quality.

4 Steps to faster HealthTech MVP development

After working with dozens of healthcare startups, we've developed a practical approach that addresses the common roadblocks in HealthTech development. There's no magic formula here—just hard-earned lessons from real projects.

Step 1: Focused planning & scope definition

Most HealthTech projects struggle to balance ambitious vision with practical constraints. We start by helping teams identify what’s truly essential for launch.

We typically run workshops that bring together your clinical, technical, and business stakeholders to align on priorities. In these sessions, we:

• Map out user journeys to identify friction points and opportunities,
• Use a modified MoSCoW method to separate actual requirements from "nice-to-haves,"
• Assess which regulatory requirements apply to your specific use case,
• Identify integration dependencies that might affect your timeline.

This upfront work consistently helps teams reduce their initial scope and focus on core features that validate their concept. A recent telehealth project we worked on trimmed its feature list from 27 planned capabilities to 11 essential ones—without compromising its core value proposition.

Step 2: Smart technical foundations

Healthcare development involves solving many of the same technical challenges repeatedly. Rather than rebuilding these components for each project, we maintain a toolkit of reusable solutions:

• Code patterns for healthcare-specific functions like PHI handling, consent management, and audit logging;
• Testing frameworks that include common healthcare validation scenarios;
• Development environment configurations with built-in security controls.

These foundational elements may not be flashy, but they eliminate redundant work, helping teams focus on innovation. For instance, implementing proper audit logging—a requirement for any application handling PHI—typically takes days to design and implement correctly. With our existing patterns, it’s done in hours.

Step 3: Strategic EHR integration

Healthcare integration is where many promising HealthTech projects hit a wall. What seems straightforward in theory—"We'll just connect to the EHR"—quickly becomes a months-long technical challenge that can derail your timeline and burn through your budget.

We've learned that successful integration starts with the right strategy, not just the right code. Our approach helps startups navigate these waters by answering three key questions:

• What data do you truly need right now? Not every solution requires full medical records. Sometimes, discrete data points or even basic demographic information are enough to validate your concept.
• Who controls the data access in your model? Are you working with patients sharing their own information, or are you dealing directly with healthcare institutions? This fundamentally changes your integration path.
• Which systems matter most for your early adopters? Instead of trying to connect with every EHR, focus on the ones your initial users actually work with.

Based on your specific situation, we typically recommend one of three proven paths:

Direct system integration

The traditional approach—connecting directly to specific EHRs like Epic or Cerner. Users authenticate with each institution separately. This makes sense when you need deep integration with specific systems and have the resources to support multiple implementations.

Patient-mediated sharing

Leverage platforms like Apple Health Records where patients have already connected their health systems. This route offers the fastest path to market for consumer applications and brings the added benefit of device data (like Apple Watch) alongside clinical records.

Healthcare data networks

Platforms like HealthGorilla provide unified access to patient data across multiple systems through a single integration point. This offers an effective balance between development speed and comprehensive data coverage.

The right choice saves substantial time and resources. 

A mental health platform we worked with initially planned direct integrations with five different EHRs—easily a whole one month undertaking. After reassessing their needs, they started with just Apple Health integration for their initial release. We implemented this in three weeks, helping them get to market months earlier while still providing the clinical data they needed.

Step 4: Incremental delivery & controlled rollouts

Healthcare software is traditionally launched with extreme caution, and for good reason. But waiting until everything is perfect often means missing valuable learning opportunities.

We've found that a more incremental approach can work well, provided you're careful about what you release and to whom:

• Start with controlled rollouts to friendly users who understand they're testing early-stage software.
• Use feature flags to control which capabilities are available to which users.
• Collect structured feedback through in-app mechanisms and user interviews.
• Monitor usage patterns to identify pain points and areas of value.

A remote monitoring startup we supported rolled out their initial functionality to just 15 users across three clinical sites. This limited release allowed them to identify and address critical usability issues before expanding to a wider audience, ultimately leading to much stronger adoption when they did their full launch.

Open-source tools to accelerate development: How we cut MVP timelines by 40%

Momentum has built several open-source tools as part of our Momentum Innovation Lab that directly address the most time-consuming aspects of HealthTech development. These aren't abstract methodologies—they're actual code and components you can use today.

Terraform HealthStack: Simplifies HIPAA-compliant infrastructure

Anyone who's worked on a healthcare application knows that setting up proper infrastructure is a headache. Between encryption requirements, access controls, audit logging, and dozens of other HIPAA technical safeguards, teams often spend weeks configuring cloud resources.

We created HealthStack to solve this problem for ourselves first. After repeatedly setting up similar environments for different clients, we extracted the patterns into reusable Terraform modules that implement healthcare best practices.

For example, here's how you'd create a HIPAA-compliant S3 bucket:

module "patient_data_storage" {
  source = "github.com/momentum/healthstack/aws-s3"

  bucket_name = "my-app-patient-data"
  region = "us-east-1"

  # HIPAA compliance features automatically configured
  encryption_type = "AES256"  # Server-side encryption
  access_logging = true       # Track who accesses what
  versioning = true           # Maintain data history

  # Access restrictions
  public_access_blocked = true
}

What does this actually include? The module handles:

• Server-side encryption configuration that meets HIPAA standards,
• Appropriate bucket policies and access controls,
• Lifecycle rules for data retention,
• Access logging setup to satisfy audit requirements,
• Proper tagging for compliance tracking.

We have similar modules for EC2, RDS, VPC configuration, IAM policies, and other AWS services commonly used in healthcare applications.

Is this revolutionary technology? No. But it saves real time on tedious, error-prone configuration work. Recently, a client with a remote monitoring application spent two days trying to properly configure their AWS infrastructure before discovering our HealthStack modules. They switched approaches and had their entire environment running correctly the next day.

Babla: Automates medical documentation workflows

Documentation is one of healthcare's biggest pain points. We built Babla as an open-source tool to help streamline medical documentation workflows. It:

• Transcribes patient-provider conversations using speech recognition,
• Automatically structures content into standard formats (SOAP notes, etc.),
• Generates summaries and highlights key information,
• Works with both real-time and pre-recorded audio.

What makes Babla particularly useful for HealthTech MVPs is its modular design. You can deploy it as a standalone Docker container or integrate specific components into your application. Teams building solutions for providers can save months of development time by leveraging this existing, tested implementation rather than building documentation features from scratch.

The tool is available in different configurations to match your specific needs and compliance requirements. You can run it completely locally using open-source models for maximum data protection, or connect it to trusted LLM providers for enhanced capabilities.

Fhirboard: Makes FHIR data usable for rapid healthcare analytics prototyping

If you're working with healthcare data standards like FHIR (Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources), you know that translating complex FHIR resources into usable analytics can be challenging.

Fhirboard addresses this by:

• Converting FHIR ViewDefinitions into SQL queries automatically,
• Providing immediate data visualization capabilities,
• Supporting quick combinations of different FHIR resources,
• Including predefined use cases for common healthcare analytics needs.

This tool has been particularly valuable for clients who need to prototype analytics dashboards quickly. Rather than spending weeks creating custom FHIR parsers and analytics pipelines, they can use Fhirboard to demonstrate functionality in days.

Development acceleration toolkit

While our open-source projects grab most of the attention, some of our most effective time-savers are the smaller, practical tools we've built for our own day-to-day development work:

DevSecOps templates for healthcare

After setting up similar CI/CD pipelines for multiple HealthTech clients, we've refined configurations that include the security checks specifically needed for applications handling PHI. These pipelines automatically scan for common issues like hardcoded credentials, unencrypted data transfers, and improper access controls.

Controlled release framework

Healthcare applications need especially careful feature rollouts. Our lightweight feature flag system lets teams control access to new functionality at a granular level—by user role, organization, or even individual user. This makes it possible to test new features with friendly users before wider release.

Healthcare testing scenarios

We maintain a library of automated test patterns for common healthcare workflows—things like appointment scheduling, prescription renewals, and referral management. Each comes with relevant test data and validation steps, cutting test development time significantly.

None of these tools are revolutionary on their own, but together they eliminate days of repetitive setup work on each project. For a team building a healthcare application with 15-20 key features, these accelerators typically save 3-4 weeks of development time compared to starting from scratch.

Proven results from Momentum’s approach

Every project is different—there's no magic formula that cuts development time by exactly X%. What we've seen across dozens of HealthTech projects, however, is that our approach consistently reduces time-to-market in meaningful ways.

The biggest time savings typically come from:

1. Infrastructure setup and compliance configuration: What traditionally takes 4-6 weeks can be reduced to days using our HealthStack modules.
2. Healthcare integrations: EHR connections that often drag on for 3+ months can be implemented in 3-7 weeks depending on the complexity and which systems you're connecting to.
3. Feature prioritization and scope management: Most projects we encounter can reduce their initial scope by 25-40% while still delivering a valuable, functional MVP.

The actual timeline savings vary based on your project's specific needs, team size, and technical complexity. A simple telehealth application might see more dramatic time savings than a complex clinical decision support tool with sophisticated algorithms.

What's most important isn't just speed, though—it's building the right foundation. Our accelerated approach actually reduces technical debt rather than creating it, because we're using proven, tested components rather than rushing through custom implementations.

Ready to launch faster? Let’s talk!

If you're tired of hearing that healthcare development "just takes longer," let's talk. Our specialized tools, healthcare-focused methodology, and proven approach can help you launch your HealthTech MVP up to 40% faster—without compromising on the quality, security, or compliance that your users deserve.

Book a free consultation ->

In this session, we'll:

• Review your current development plans and identify specific acceleration opportunities,
• Discuss which technical accelerators would benefit your project most,
• Provide a realistic roadmap for getting your product to market faster.

Let's build healthcare's future together—at the speed innovation demands.