Migrating a Healthcare SaaS from AngularJS to Next.js: What 10 Years of Technical Debt Actually Looks Like

This is the first article in a series about migrating a production healthcare platform from AngularJS to Next.js — not a tutorial, but a war story from the trenches. How It All Started In 2015, our team was building a large desktop application for medical imaging — a Java Swing system that could span across multiple monitors, handling thousands of functions for measurements, contouring, 3D modeling, and PACS integrations. It was a serious piece of software. Then one of our clients — a major university hospital — suggested adding a quality improvement tracking module. The idea was to build it into the existing desktop app, but our team lead at the time pushed back. The imaging application was already overloaded. So we spun off an independent web project. The stack decision happened while I was traveling. AngularJS was chosen — it was the hot framework of 2015, and the person who pushed for it made a convincing case. Most of our team had deep desktop experience but limited web background