Best Practices for Automating Testing of Healthcare Applications

To fully realize the benefits of digital transformation, hospitals and health systems are increasingly doing their own development. For example, a health system may build applications such as patient portals or smartphone apps to enhance their patient experience. However, healthcare organizations are finding it difficult to recruit and retain information technology (IT) professionals with critical digital skills. Not only has this become an impediment to digital transformation efforts, but the lack of skilled IT resources is also interfering with hospitals’ ability to build their own applications and systems.

The trend of embracing homegrown software development has taken many by surprise. With this shift, many healthcare organizations must take the time to properly test the applications and dashboards they have created internally. Unfortunately, this already challenging task is compounded when healthcare organizations do not have the appropriate subject matter experts available to properly vet these new systems.

When healthcare organizations procure commercial off-the shelf (COTS) products, the expectation is that the applications will already have been thoroughly tested by the manufacturer. When hospitals and health systems make modifications or do their own development, however, the responsibility for testing software comprehensively falls on them. And that requires enough resources to guarantee separation, heterogenous data and replicable testing workflows.

An automated solution that can run test scripts can help an inhouse development team avoid the biases that a builder might have so they don’t overlook any possible errors in the software.

Similarly, when healthcare organizations use automated testing, they don’t need to ask analysts to create varied individual patient profiles for testing. Instead, the solution is designed to ensure there is sufficient randomization in data fields like age, gender, race, ethnicity, and insurance coverage to confirm that all alerts are working as designed. Unlike manual testing, automated testing can quickly and easily run the same test multiple times with different data combinations.

Finally, automated test solutions also provide healthcare organizations the ability to use repeatable test workflows to validate the application or software.

Keysight Technologies’ automated test solution, Eggplant Test, runs on a proprietary language called SenseTalk that makes it easy to design test workflows without requiring a team that is comfortable working in programming languages like Python or C#. 

SenseTalk’s intuitive programming interface requires little to no programming experience to  create reliable testing scripts. With so many in-house development teams going beyond their normal role to perform testing work, having this kind of support allows staff to do so without pushing them to the point of breaking.

Healthcare organizations implementing new technologies and applications to improve communications, efficiency, and data management benefit when they deploy automated test solutions. That remains true whether they are enhancing COTS solutions or building their own applications and makes it easier for healthcare organizations to make the most of their systems to advance digital transformation efforts.

Automated software testing solutions allow healthcare organizations to make the most of the resources they already have on hand as they expand their software offerings.