What Cognizant gets wrong in Healthcare
Digital health companies that engage Cognizant for platform development get the offshore managed services model applied to a product that needs to move at startup velocity. The result is a product development cadence that is incompatible with the competitive environment. While a Cognizant managed services team is processing change requests through a statement of work process, competitors are shipping.
HIPAA compliance for digital health platforms requires specific architectural decisions at the infrastructure layer — and those decisions must be made by engineers who are accountable for the production system. Cognizant's offshore delivery model puts the engineers who make architectural decisions in a different time zone from the compliance team that assesses those decisions. The gap between decision and assessment is where compliance failures originate.
Digital health companies also face a specific risk from the TriZetto breach: any payer integrations running on Cognizant-managed infrastructure inherit the security posture of that infrastructure. A digital health platform that processes prior authorization requests through TriZetto APIs is potentially affected by the same managed services security culture that allowed a 12-month breach to go undetected.
What we deploy instead
We build digital health products with HIPAA-compliant architecture from day one and at the velocity that competitive digital health development requires. Two-week sprints, production code at each milestone, compliance validated at every commit.
No managed services dependency. Your team owns and operates the system we build. The engagement ends with a working product and full IP transfer — not a managed services contract.
HIPAA and SOC 2 built into the architecture from day one — enforced automatically by ALICE at every commit.
Fixed-price engagements. Production system in 8-20 weeks. No discovery phase. No change orders.
Domain-qualified engineers with healthcare experience. The senior engineer who scopes the engagement is the senior engineer who delivers it.
Full source code and documentation transferred at close. No licensing. No managed services dependency.
The compliance difference
HIPAA, HITRUST, SOC 2 Type II. Digital health compliance is the product architecture. We build it that way from the first sprint.
What switching from Cognizant looks like
Digital health product engagement: 10-16 weeks to a HIPAA-compliant production launch. Team: 6-12 engineers. Fixed price. Full IP transfer.
Architecture review and scope definition. We review existing deliverables and identify gaps.
Scope locked, team assembled, first sprint underway. Working code from week two.
First production milestone — a working integration or system component, not a document.
Full IP transfer. Source code, documentation, operational runbooks. Your team runs the system.
Failed Vendor Recovery Playbook
Step-by-step framework for recovering from a failed Cognizant engagement — from emergency stabilisation through full re-platforming. 4-phase playbook covering stabilise, assess, transition, and normalise.