Healthtech company unifies and secures its developer platform

Healthtech company unifies and secures its developer platform

A Healthtech company with five diverse large business units had a fragmented developer environment spread across GitLab, GitHub, and Bitbucket. Through a hands-on proof of concept (POC), Modus Create helped the company develop a path to consolidating its CI/CD pipelines, standardizing source code management, and validating GitHub Actions as a scalable solution. The successful POC set the stage for a complete migration to GitHub Enterprise Cloud and GitHub Actions, giving developers a secure, modern, and unified platform and thereby improving the developer experience.

OUR WORK INVOLVED

• Collaborative GitHub PoC across five business units
• Repository migration with history and metadata
• CI/CD re-engineering using GitHub Actions
• GitHub Advanced Security enablement
• Change management and stakeholder alignment
• Initiated support around GitHub Copilot

Engineering teams thrive on autonomy. But at scale, too much autonomy can lead to tool sprawl, inconsistent workflows, and mounting overhead. In other words: a poor developer experience.

That’s exactly where one healthtech company found itself. A global company with five business units that provides digital software to the healthcare industry, its developers were split across three developer platforms: GitLab, GitHub, and Bitbucket. Each team had its own CI/CD stack and workflows, making collaboration harder and documentation uneven. Maintaining multiple platforms was proving to be both expensive and inefficient.

The company knew it needed a modern, unified developer environment to take full advantage of GitHub Copilot’s features. But with three platforms in play, the decision wasn’t obvious. Which one would become the foundation for a unified developer experience?

Challenge

Fragmented developer environments

Each of the healthtech company’s five business units operated independently. Some teams used GitLab CI/CD. Others relied on Jenkins. A few had already made partial migrations to GitHub. And some remained heavily invested in GitLab. Meanwhile, the internal security team was pushing for standardization to cut complexity and shrink the threat surface.

The company narrowed the options to two platforms: GitLab and GitHub. Both had the potential to support a unified developer experience. So, they took a pragmatic approach to build POCs on both and see which one delivered.

To ensure the GitHub PoC addressed the company’s specific needs, GitHub recommended Modus Create as the solutions partner.

Solution

Building a collaborative PoC on GitHub

A cross-functional team from Modus Create teamed up with the healthtech company to co-develop the GitHub PoC. The approach was intentionally collaborative and designed not just to showcase GitHub’s capabilities, but to build internal buy-in across all business units.

1. Building consensus with working sessions

Instead of running traditional discovery meetings, the team took a more hands-on approach, embedding with each business unit one at a time. These were working sessions, not status calls. The goal was to see each development team’s setup in action, understand their day-to-day workflows, and uncover what was really happening under the hood.

This rotating rhythm helped us understand the nuances of each business unit’s environment and provided real-time migration guidance tailored to their setup.

2. Migration and re-engineering CI/CD workflows

Each business unit selected 2-3 repositories for the PoC. Our team then guided their migration to GitHub, along with associated commit histories, comments, and pull requests where needed.

But this wasn’t just a lift-and-shift operation. CI/CD pipelines were re-engineered in GitHub Actions, often replacing complex workflows originally built in Jenkins or GitLab CI/CD. These pipelines weren’t demos but mirrored real production logic. To validate them, developers ran typical change scenarios end-to-end, confirming that the new pipelines held up to everyday use.

3. Enabling GitHub Advanced Security (GHAS)

Working closely with GitHub’s team, we activated GHAS on the selected repositories. This allowed internal stakeholders to see how security features, like secret scanning, code scanning, and dependency reviews, could be centrally configured and enforced across teams.

This step was a critical part of the PoC. It validated GitHub’s ability to meet the company’s enterprise-wide security and compliance requirements without adding custom tooling or operational overhead. Just as importantly, it demonstrated how consistent policies could be rolled out across all business units, no matter where teams were starting from.

4. Addressing resistance with transparency

One business unit wasn’t convinced. Heavily invested in GitLab, that business unit flagged valid concerns, including feature gaps, migration complexity, and disruption to familiar developer workflows.

We didn’t dismiss the feedback. Instead, we leaned in. The team conducted a side-by-side feasibility analysis, acknowledged where GitHub fell short, and proposed workarounds when needed, never forcing alignment, always prioritizing trust.

5. Driving stickiness with GitHub Copilot

Modus Create’s Training and Enablement team partnered with key stakeholders to design hands-on sessions aligned with both business goals and budget. Drawing on our experience scaling enablement across large teams, we delivered targeted 101 (beginner) and 201 (intermediate) workshops. We then followed up with an ROI session to help teams translate their performance, usage, and priorities into actionable metrics.

Impact

Strong foundation for a unified developer experience

In less than a month, all five of the healthtech company’s business units had migrated some repositories to GitHub, rebuilt and validated CI/CD pipelines using GitHub Actions, and enabled GHAS on key projects. More importantly, they all aligned internally around GitHub as the unified development platform.

The impact went beyond the technical. The company now has a clear, proven path to consolidate its fragmented tooling into a single, secure, and scalable environment and improve the developer experience.