Key Focus Areas while Testing a Healthcare App
Players in the healthcare industry face growing competition and have to keep up with the changes. The patients, today, have much greater options. Facilities have to understand what their target audience needs and present their services and brands in the best possible light.
Hospitals, clinics, and physician’s offices now find more sense in automating workflows that seemed to be too tedious. A healthcare app is an excellent tool for the industry to address many of the challenges. Among other functionalities, these apps can make the connection and communication between patients and healthcare facilities much easier.
Need for Health Care App Testing Services
When it comes to creating and launching a healthcare app, it is important that it meets all the regulatory and compliance requirements including HIPAA. The app should integrate and function seamlessly with the other existing systems used within the facility. There are many other user experience (UX) standards that it must meet.
Explore the key focus areas that must be addressed by health care app testing services:
1. Performance Testing
Health apps typically serve a much smaller number of users within a smaller geographical location compared to e-commerce or social media apps. Still, the implications of these apps are significant and performance is an important concern. The findings from performance testing can help health care app testing services and designers to define many areas including:
- Scalability model
- Local data size
- Archival strategy
If a health app saves data or involves significant CPU intensive functions, it is essential to conduct extensive performance evaluation.
2. Data Confidentiality
The basics of a healthcare app design and testing must follow strict authorization and access control. This area must be carefully and fully taken care of. In fact, health care app testing services must go beyond and address the following sections too:
I. Departmental Controls
The patient care team must be able to access protected health information (PHI).
II. Report Generated Data
When it comes to health care app testing services, the relevant PHI fields should be concealed when the user doesn’t access patient data. It is important to implement strong restrictions on data availability within the main electronic health record (EHR) work process of the app.
3. Test Data Management
The coverage of test situation authentications affects the quality of a QA initiative. This depends on the availability of how diverse the test data is. This is more important when automation is an integral part of the QA strategy for protecting the strength of clinical/non-clinical workflows.
The test management strategy for health care app testing services must have the following characteristics:
- Inconsistent form of data must be covered
- The test data must be similar to production data
- It must ensure a quick refresh at sub-category of production data
- Referential reliability of the data and external links should not be accepted
- The PHI should be organized for compliance confirmation
4. Usability Testing
Usability-based issues can also result in clinical issues. So, this is a crucial area to be addressed by health care app testing services. The characteristics of usability are typically fixed before the app reaches the testing phase. The IT department is the one that is usually focused on usability related issues during the testing process. There is a simple reason for that – IT adoption is a major challenge in healthcare.
5. Automation
Interestingly, automated testing has greater significance in the healthcare sector than in any other industry. The reason is primarily the importance of healthcare in maintaining the standard of human lives.
Tips for Testing Healthcare Apps
Now that you know which key areas are most important for health care app testing services, it is recommended to follow some important tips. These tips can help tipsters achieve better results with these apps:
- It is quite important to record dates with utmost accuracy. Even a minor irregularity can result in a major defect that may remain unnoticed.
- Healthcare apps have various parameters that must be considered when designing the test cases. The key parameters include:
- Providers
- Members
- Methods of calculating commission
- Various types of plans
- Specialized health care app testing services are expected to have testers with comprehensive domain knowledge
The testers must understand the users for each system. They should be capable of thinking from their perspective. This is crucial to help testing services to detect defects with greater accuracy.
Types of Healthcare Apps
There is a surge in the number of healthcare apps available for different types and sizes of facilities in the industry. There are different players in this market who are leveraging the smartphone revolution by developing and releasing apps to make their processes simpler, faster and more efficient.
There are different types of apps, serving different types of end-users. Some of the common examples are as following:
- Some categories of apps are designed to facilitate communication between patients and doctors. For example, apps for diabetics can send relevant readings to the primary care physician. They help the physician keep track of their patient’s health.
- Some apps combine electronic medical records (EMR) into the algorithm to make it easier for doctors, hospitals, and clinics to maintain accurate records that can be readily accessed.
- There are other types of apps that allow users to make healthier choices by providing them with expert suggestions in the areas of nutrition and fitness.
Also Read: Rise In Telemedicine And The Need For Healthcare Testing Services
Benefits of Healthcare Apps
There are different types of apps and health care app testing services ensure that all of them perform to their stipulated standards. These applications are meant to make healthcare processes simpler and comfortable. There are many more ways in which these apps benefit their intended users:
i. Secure Communication
Some healthcare apps can provide essential medical records and information about the patient. They can enable secure communication between the patient and doctor using encryption. This can help ensure compliance.
ii. Reporting & Monitoring
Some healthcare apps can enable regular monitoring of the patient. This can allow the practitioner or nurses to keep track of their patients’ health. This function can be beneficial in the following cases:
- Asthmatic attacks
- Heart failure
- Diabetes
And other conditions with life-threatening consequences. The job of health care app testing services can become even more complicated when testing apps connected to smart medical devices that collect various health-related data to be transmitted to the physician.
iii. Scheduling Appointments
Many apps have the appointment scheduling feature integrated into them. This allows users to schedule appointments from anywhere and at any time.
iv. Record Consultation
Some apps can also have the feature to allow users to record conversations with their medical practitioner. There are many ways that these recorded consultations can be used by doctors and patients.
Some apps also include the feature of sharing reports, medical documents, and test results. This can help save time for everyone involved, providing all the relevant information on the fingertips.
Conclusion
The demand for healthcare apps continues to increase at a rapid pace. While the mobile technology available today is an important driving force behind this surge in both demand and availability, the role of health care app testing services has increased significantly.
It is important for testing services to keep up with the new features that keep getting added to such applications and ensure that they work at their optimal levels while meeting compliance requirements at the same time.