The healthcare industry is quickly moving away from the conventional manual process-driven approach and progressing towards a consolidated digital health experience. New digital technologies, built upon data and structured to improve ongoing patient care, disease management, and overall patient experience, are increasingly being deployed in healthcare institutions.
AI-powered intelligent automation is taking over repetitive administrative tasks, data-backed contextual interference is bridging the gap between caregivers and patients, telehealth and telemedicine are improving healthcare access for marginalized communities, and AR/VR and remote-monitoring wearables enable patients to actively self-diagnose and partake in self-care.
Underlying all these changes is a digital transformation process with many moving parts. Different applications, brand-new systems, disjointed workflows, distributed networks, and disconnected databases must be integrated within conventional frameworks and technology systems to deliver the modern digital healthcare experience.
Not only does this require an entire overhaul of the existing digital architecture but do that while maintaining HIPPA compliance standards, guaranteeing process continuity, enabling data privacy and security, and efficiently managing costs and available resources.
Keeping up with all these changes without hampering existing processes is no mean task. But with intelligent test automation, it is possible. Automated testing condenses the testing cycles, accelerates software development, reduces forced downtime, and hastens release times, allowing companies to continually meet their business needs without affecting the supply chain, productivity, and operations.
How does test automation help healthcare institutions digitalize?
Medical devices compatibility
According to WHO, over 2 million medical devices worldwide are categorized into 7000 generic categories. Everyone from laypersons at home to paramedics in ambulances to healthcare professionals in advanced healthcare facilities categorically utilizes the data from these devices to save lives. The devices must connect underlying software, systems, and data servers without friction. The data flow between the devices and the systems must be seamless and quick, as the inability to access the data as and when necessary, can affect time-to-treatment.
Optimizing the data flow requires a robust testing framework to ensure interoperability between the devices and data systems. Manual testing can slow down this process, introduce inadvertent errors, and compromise data security and compliance. On the other hand, test automation makes identifying bugs easier, fortifies a more holistic QA environment, and enables the logging of an audit trail. Accelerated testing allows institutions to quickly integrate medical devices with the core medical software and ensure minimal downtime.
Resource-saving
Digital health services are directly built upon existing applications and systems. But unlike conventional applications, digital health applications must support a much wider set of use cases, devices, behaviors, parameters, and scenarios. This makes testing a much more comprehensive process, eating into available human and machine resources. Manually, testing in such a situation can become time-consuming, redundant, and prone to errors.
With test automation, the QA team can leverage test case reusability, parallel testing, and smart scheduling features to make resource utilization much more efficient. Functional and usability tests can be scheduled parallelly across a number of environments during off-hours to ensure higher-quality software and a shorter development cycle.
Security
Patient databases contain extremely sensitive datasets such as disease history, insurance details, and PIIs. Moreover, the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act, or HIPAA, requires healthcare institutions to follow strict protocols to safeguard patient data. User data validation, log-in procedure documentation, and encryption are just a few of them. Test automation allows for synthetic test data creation that mimics production data. Instead of relying on actual production data and then running afoul of the authorities, using representative data keeps organizations on the green side of compliance.
Moreover, automated testing lets the QA team quickly build more test case scenarios that cover a wide range of possible data flows across channels and systems. End-to-end testing ensures no data gets compromised when the application is launched.
Cost-saving
According to a Ponemon Institute study, downtime and unplanned outages in the healthcare industry is around $7900 per minute. These costs don’t even factor in the revenue losses and HIPAA fines in case of regulatory violations.
Most downtime occurs due to poor system and network connectivity, cybersecurity, and human error. With proper testing, many of these instances can be rooted out, resulting in cost savings.
But that’s not all.
Automated testing allows for more extensive regression testing – the working of each layer is validated repeatedly, ensuring connectivity and communication issues between systems don’t occur. Security testing across all user scenarios eliminates most cybersecurity risks, synthetic test data creation keeps HIPAA non-compliance issues at bay, and test automation reduces human errors.
It also brings down verification, debugging, and maintenance costs.
The landscape of the healthcare sector has dramatically altered to include digital health offerings across a range of verticals. New medical devices and applications have rapidly compelled institutions to integrate them within their existing systems architecture. This has increased the immediate need for a robust test automation solution like Avo Assure.
Avo Assure is a heterogeneous no-code automated testing solution that enables seamless end-to-end testing and process validation, accessibility testing, parallel testing, test scheduling, autonomous test creation, easy test maintenance and scalability, and intuitive visual reporting. It reduces production defects to less than 1%, infrastructure requirements by 80%, and test cycles by 60%.
To learn more about Avo Assure and its impact on the digitalization of healthcare, book a demo today.
