The Role of DevSecOps in Enhancing Digital Therapeutics Platforms for Behavioural Health

With the growing use of digital therapeutics (DTx) in behavioural health, there are serious challenges associated with regulatory compliance, data privacy and software security, particularly given sensitive patient data and the current development of global standards including HIPAA, GDPR and the Digital Personal Data Protection (DPDP) Act. The current DevOps practices, which are maximally agile delivery and scalable, do not involve any inherent mechanisms of active security enforcement and ongoing regulatory compliance. The paper presents the concept of DevSecOps, which is the expansion of DevOps that incorporates the concept of security and compliance into the software development life cycle, in advancing the safety, transparency, and reliability of behavioural health DTx platforms. It is suggested to employ a domain-specific DevSecOps, which incorporates compliance-as-code, infrastructure-as-code, validation of policy at the CI/CD steps, and runtime protection systems and auditing layers to attain ongoing compliance. The empirical evidence shows that there is a quantifiable improvement in policy drift, granularity of the audit trail, and policy resilience at runtime without affecting the development velocity. The results highlight the need to incorporate codified compliance processes within DTx infrastructure to reduce the chances of violating regulatory practices, data breach, and misconfigured software. This study brings out the groundbreaking possibilities of DevSecOps in controlled healthcare settings and offers a scalable template that developers, architects, and compliance professionals operating in the context of behavioural digital therapeutics environments apply to the implementation of secure, reliable, and regulation-compliant delivery pipelines.