Top Healthcare QA Challenges and how Kualitatem is Solving Them!

Healthcare reforms and administrative mandates have driven a gigantic change in the business and IT industry. Healthcare applications require extensive, prolonged and immoderate testing endeavors to prove their adequacy, quality and security before they can be securely conveyed to the clients.

As the Healthcare technology is moderately new, most associations are endeavoring to develop successful healthcare applications or their verification and validation test strategies.

Biggest QA challenge is getting the healthcare applications tested and accepted under certifiable conditions with an expansive and invariably developing variety of cell phones and OS versions, which need to be bolstered by such Apps. With an increase in the demand for healthcare applications, there is also a rise in the complexity of the applications.

Have a look at some of the challenges usually faced while testing healthcare applications and how Kualitatem Inc. is helping US Health Care Providers to address each one of these challenges:

• Compliance Testing: Along with other conformance standards such as HIPAA, HL7, CCD/CDA etc. the industry is now also working on implementing ICD-10, that will change every aspect of medical practice – from the front desk to the back office – from policies and procedures for documentation and systems.

Kualitatem is already investing in online ICD- 10 Trainings to ensure that we can help current clients with a smooth transition to ICD-10 practices. Testers at Kualitatem are being trained on various standards which help them to ensure that the designed application conforms to completely fulfill the requirements of the various standards.

• Mobile Testing: By the end of 2015, around 500 million mobile phone users worldwide will rely upon mobiles platform to consistently utilize some health care applications; by 2018, the industry specialists expect 1.7 billion versatile consumers to utilize health care applications. These users generally include nurses, doctors, patients, pharmacists and health care professionals. Testing healthcare apps for web and mobile compatibility is another one of the biggest challenges across the industry.

With a world class test lab in place; Kualitatem ensures that every healthcare app is optimized for key mobile devices across multiple operating platforms such as iOS, Android and Windows Phone. QA test engineers at Kualitatem verify the healthcare applications keeping in mind the following aspects:

• Healthcare mobile applications should be intuitive, easy to use and require less learning effort.

• Healthcare applications should fulfill the requirements of various standards.

• Healthcare applications should be reliable, secure, and accurate to fulfill the consumer requirements.

• Data populated in the dashboards of doctors, nurses, pharmacist, patients etc. should be validated.

• Data synced from any third party tool should be verified because most of the healthcare applications, import data of patients from third party.

• Furthermore, different status generation and alerts should be verified as per the clients’ needs.

• Criteria of data population against various filter tabs should be completely verified on all devices as requested.

• Roles and workflows should be tested accurately because Physicians, pharmacists, nurses, doctors and patients all have entirely different roles assigned therefore the test strategy should be according to their responsibilities.

• Interconnected workflows should be tested.

• Security: With security breaches on the rise, application level testing takes on new importance. With a range of conformance standards, security becomes a key testing area for any healthcare application.

Kualitatem has the right set of skills and security testing tools to perform comprehensive penetration and security testing. Kualitatem can contribute to security assessments in various phases such as compliance and implementations.

• Agile Development & Testing: As healthcare development goes Agile there is a need for testers to understand and adapt to the process. A tester is no more a bug hunter.

At Kualitatem we train the testers with the right kind of business domain knowledge so that they can contribute above and beyond their traditional roles. We are also focusing on equipping the team with latest dev trends, particularly SMAC.

• Cloud, SAAS & Big Data: As healthcare data make a shift to cloud, it will bring along a range of new testing challenges. We are planning to use more service and network virtualization to handle the cloud; evolving performance testing practices and establishing Data Quality Management practices to test data migration initiatives. QA resources will be trained to test the BI/reports & dashboard, data population against various metrics and attributes and migration & transformations of data as per the applied business rules.

• Testing Center of Excellence: As other industries embrace the TCoE model, health care industry also needs to make that switch. Introduction of standards, testing processes, test tools and methods will facilitate all major kinds of testing types and hence ensure scalable and robust applications.

Kualitatem is on its way to establish a TCoE’s across multiple business domains such as telecom, banking and healthcare.

• Tool Innovation: Healthcare apps are massive in terms of testing scope and maintenance. The best way to handle that is automation testing.

Kualitatem is specialized in providing the right mix of licensed and open source tools to help achieve a balance of time and money. We have a wide skill set across creating and maintaining solutions for functional and performance automation. In simple terms, we are a one stop shop for all test automation needs.