GenAI-Accelerated Medical Software Development

Business context

Surgical teams must manage diagnostic data, treatment plans and high-precision medical devices in parallel during procedures. A treatment-assistance application brings these inputs into one guided digital workflow, reducing manual handovers, lowering the risk of transcription errors and freeing valuable operating room time for patient care.

Project overview

A leading medical technology manufacturer set out to develop a next-generation treatment-assistance application for surgeons. The immediate objective was to deliver a production-grade user experience within a compressed timeframe, combining intuitive interaction design with robust UI architecture for complex surgical workflows.

Because the application was intended for global deployment, the solution also needed to support efficient localization across languages and markets without compromising usability or consistency.

The full project was delivered in a fixed-price model, providing cost predictability while maintaining delivery discipline and quality standards.

Our approach

ZEISS Digital Innovation combined agile project leadership with an integrated MedTech specialized delivery team working closely with the client across UI architecture, frontend implementation, surgical camera integration, software design documentation and localization readiness.

To achieve the required delivery speed, GenAI was embedded into the software engineering workflow as an accelerator for analysis, implementation support and quality improvement.

GenAI was used directly inside daily engineering activities rather than as a separate experiment.
Expertise in using GenAI effectively combined with deep domain knowledge turned GenAI into reliable support for clarification, option analysis, task breakdown and implementation.
Automated quality gates including testing and code-quality analysis ensured that increased delivery speed did not compromise software quality.
Human review gates ensured that engineers validated outputs before acceptance and kept architectural and quality decisions human-owned.

The solution

The team delivered jointly with the client’s team a modern, fully functioning treatment-assistant workflow with high-quality UI implementation and defined and implemented integration points for the client’s surgical camera ecosystem. Delivery was accelerated through a GenAI-augmented team model while meeting the quality expectations of medical software development within a fixed-price engagement.

Our services

Software engineering:

Frontend architecture
Frontend/UI implementation
API implementation
Hardware integration

Quality Assurance:

Full functional testing – semi-automated
GenAI-driven in code documentation

AI-assisted quality:

Multi-pass code review
Refactoring
Unit test creation
Design documentation improvement

Additional support:

Prototypical localization
Dependency packaging

Technical environment

Core stack:

C++17
QT6
Visual Studio 2022
SVN (Jenkins)
Azure DevOps
Cross-platform UI framework

Results

Compared with expected delivery effort derived from comparable medical software projects and ZEISS Digital Innovation‘s extensive software engineering experience in regulated healthcare environments, our GenAI-augmented team demonstrated substantial efficiency gains across selected software engineering activities.

UI implementation and code-completion support

~3x
faster

Repetitive refactoring and restructuring
~5x
faster

Unit-test generation focused on coverage
~10x
faster

Creation of in-code documentation

Velocity

The team accelerated delivery in UI implementation, refactoring, test generation and documentation while maintaining a disciplined engineering process to ensure highest quality.

Quality

AI-assisted multi-pass reviews surfaced convention issues, documentation gaps and duplicate-code risks earlier in the delivery cycle.

Predictability

The delivery model increased throughput while preserving human accountability, supporting reliable execution in a fixed-price engagement.

We have never seen UI screens implemented with this level of speed and quality.

UX Designer Leading MedTech manufacturer
ZEISS Digital Innovation brought the specialized MedTech, UX and engineering expertise we needed to turn our product vision into a production-ready solution—accelerating significantly delivery, providing cost predictability and meeting the quality standards required for software in Medical Technology.

Product Manager Leading MedTech manufacturer