Rise in Telemedicine and the Need for Healthcare Testing Services

Rise in Telemedicine and the Need for Healthcare Testing Services

Healthcare App Testing Services

The COVID-19 pandemic has brought to the fore the importance of taking care of your health. With co-morbidity issues accounting for a major portion of COVID-19 deaths, increasing self-immunity has become extremely important. 

Millions have already been infected with the deadly virus across the globe. Such is the effect of the pandemic that even people with health issues are being requested to stay away from hospitals. The situation is indeed very scary! What do we do if we fall sick? Where do we go? How do we take care of ourselves and our families? What medicines should we take?

So many questions; but are answers available? Yes! And it is the pandemic which has been the catalyst to finding this answer. Telemedicine, a revolutionary step in healthcare, refers to the use of telecommunications by healthcare professionals to:

  • Understand the symptoms
  • Evaluate and diagnose them using healthcare apps
  • Then ensure proper treatment is meted out

What is telemedicine?

Telemedicine was once a hard sell. Today it is a way of life; the new normal in healthcare!

Millions are affected across the globe. Is the healthcare system updated enough to deal with this sudden influx of patients? No. Is face to face consultation with a doctor a practical solution? Not unless it is an emergency.

This is where telemedicine apps step in. But telemedicine cannot be successful if it is not backed by advanced healthcare testing services that ensures the healthcare apps are functioning well and are completely accurate. 

The sudden surge in demand for telemedicine has resulted in developers working overtime to ensure efficiency, accuracy and security of these apps and equally by quality analysis teams offering healthcare testing services for these apps.

But why are healthcare apps so important?

The healthcare apps form a communications channel between the healthcare professionals and the patients thereby reducing their need for:

  • Face to face consultations and
  • Visits to hospitals.

It is a welcome change for all since even the healthcare professionals are overburdened due to the impact of the ongoing pandemic.

Applicability of healthcare apps in telemedicine

A healthcare app needs to cater to all the aspects of telemedicine. For this, it is important to understand the applicability, usage and functionality of telemedicine. Some aspects of telemedicine which have become increasingly popular are:

  • Follow-up visits: Patients do not need to come back to the doctor or the hospital for follow-up visits. It can be done remotely using the app even for Coronavirus carriers. This helps patients save time, money and energy and healthcare officials are also able to manage better.
  • Chronic conditions management: Doctors monitor patient’s health remotely. They need to access the heart rate and blood pressure glucose levels etc. Today technological advances enable data transmission between devices easily. The need is a healthcare app which will be able to add value to this remote monitoring. 

Telemedicine is thus expected to make life easier for people who have diabetes, cancer, heart diseases etc. They get the best of treatment and also follow social distancing to keep them safe from Coronavirus. 

  • Specialist consultations: For many patients, opting for specialist consultations means dealing with quite a few hassles like travelling, waiting, taking extra time out etc. But telecommunications technology usage enables these people to opt for specialist consultations right from the comfort of their homes.

Sharing of information between doctors, especially specialists, regarding the conditions of a particular patient can also be easily facilitated. Thus the need is to share diagnostic images, blood sample analysis reports generated by healthcare apps to enable proper assessment. 

  • Medication management: For the elderly and chronic disease afflicted, medicine management is a very important part of their daily routine. With many seniors forgetting to take their daily medicines on time, healthcare professionals and providers can ensure the same by using telemedicine apps to monitor the situation constantly. 
  • Updated hospital information: With COVID-19 striking many healthcare officials, there are instances wherein hospitals are opting for closure due to quarantine. In such instances, ambulances carrying critical patients might have to waste valuable time in going from one hospital to another. Healthcare apps can be kept updated so that people know beforehand if the hospital is closed or if the Emergency room is filled to capacity. This will enable them to change decisions and act on them promptly.

Need for healthcare app testing

The healthcare apps form the backbone of telemedicine and for this concept to be successfully implemented, they need proper testing to ensure high performance and fully-functional and user-friendly interface. The bar for quality assurance needs to be raised to remove the scope for any inaccuracy or data breach. 

Various apps and web platforms like Practo, DocsApp, MFine etc. provide just the required tools to connect a doctor to a patient. Virtual consultations are enabled, medicines prescribed and patients initiated on a road to recovery. Digital payment platforms have further helped to make the system complete.

Today medical professionals are relying heavily on these apps. Thus they need to perform on all KPIs and healthcare app testing needs to validate the following features:

  • Data security: The healthcare industry is a veritable goldmine for hackers and infiltration is very common. Statistics prove that 27% of all data breaches that happen originate in this sector. To overcome this vulnerability, healthcare testing services play a critical role. 

Using data encryption, for data in motion and at rest, is one way to secure all data contained in the app. However, while it may be easy to verify data in motion, it is slightly difficult for data at rest. Since these healthcare apps are generally downloaded on smart devices, the encryption has to work optimally. 

The apps maintain secure and safe payment options. The patient can choose to make a payment using an option of convenience. Healthcare app testing ensures that the payment gateways are safe and the app developers take extra care to ensure there is no data breach.

Healthcare testing services employ the latest technology to test all the web and hybrid applications for their security risks.

  • Data privacy: Access to data in these apps needs to be strictly controlled. Without proper authorization, no data should be allowed to be accessed. Boundaries need to be set so that people who can receive specific data can be defined.

Healthcare testing services ensure that the data masking works well to prevent any unauthorized access to confidential patient data.

  • Usability: This is a KPI on which every healthcare app needs to perform. Usability issues tend to translate into clinical issues making the patient suffer in the process. Proper usability testing helps ensure that patients or other end users can easily use these apps and without the need of much technical know-how. 
  • Digital health records: These apps make it possible for patients to say goodbye to paper prescriptions. With digital health records, you can access your health records from anyplace and at any time. Having your medical history made available with just a few clicks is a convenience which few patients can do away with. Data management is also a critical aspect verified during app testing.

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Also Read: Best Practices to Ensure Healthcare Mobile App Security

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  • Conformance: Simply put, there are certain compliances that healthcare apps need to follow. Following are some of the compliances that need to be adhered to by the apps and the same are verified by healthcare testing services:
  1. Regulatory compliances: These regulations are country-specific and deal not only with the workings of the medical professionals but also with data security and other such important aspects.
  2. Functional completeness: The app developed for telemedicine needs to be functionally complete. 
  3. Interoperability compliance: This deal with the syntactic and semantic interoperability agreement present between two healthcare entities that decide to join forces for a specific medical emergency or need.
  • Performance: If the app does not perform well, the whole exercise of its creation goes to waste. This results in a colossal waste of time, money and energy. This increases the criticality of performance testing before the app’s release. The ability to immediately procure the demanded information, the ready availability of updated clinical data etc, are some areas where this app needs to perform well. Healthcare testing services ensures that there is proper performance testing. Scalability, archival strategy, local data size etc.; all such features are verified by expert testing engineers using automated and cloud-based testing services. Some types of healthcare testing services for these apps include:
  1. Functional testing to check if the functional capabilities are working fine,
  2. Medical imaging testing which is specialized test automation done to test the performance of certain medical imaging app like MESA, Mirth etc.,
  3. Platform testing to check the performance of the app on various popular platforms and also ensure cross-browser compatibility,
  4. Conformance testing to ensure all statutory compliances are met and
  5. Load testing and performance testing which set the load and performance standards for the app.

Testing for apps related to healthcare needs to be done on many different levels. These levels pertain to its usage at the doctor’s end, the patients’ end and even for the health insurance provider. It is common knowledge that of all the healthcare apps made, only a few reach the top. The reason is very simple – thorough and accurate testing. Only when an app is subjected to rigorous 360-degree testing can it attain superlative status and be counted among the top few.

How Healthy is Your Health Care App?

How Healthy is Your Health Care App?

It would not be an exaggeration if the intervention of technology and innovation blurs the existing traditional healthcare boundaries. Studies show that the global digital healthcare market is expected to rise from USD$182.63 Bn (2017) to USD $665.36 Bn (2026) with a CAGR of 15.4%.

This alarming growth has brought the healthcare and life sciences industries to the brink of a humongous disruption. Now, that the future of the healthcare industry is getting defined by radically interoperable data, secured open source platforms and integrated safety measures, how will your app fare in the increasingly competitive and inevitable healthcare digital world? What role is your app going to play in this scenario?

At this point, the proper functioning, user experience and the safety of the patient’s data stored on your healthcare app is of utmost priority and it is important that you pass your app through rigorous healthcare app testing services. These services can seamlessly help, in implementing operational digital strategies, to give the app credibility and edge.

The initial necessities of developing and testing a healthcare app is to access control, promote navigability, implement strict authorization requirements and enforce data safety. As applications grow in complexity by the day it is becoming increasingly important to ensure thorough app testing services are leveraged. Outlined below are some of the core areas to keep in mind:

Security Testing Services

This is a niche practice to rectify and resolve the loopholes, which may otherwise foster a security breach compromising the integrity, safety and confidentiality of patient’s important data, and reducing the usability of the app. The assessment starts by reviewing the security features and understanding the scope based on which test scenarios are created; an effective toolset is then identified and shortlisted.

The security tester initiates the architectural review process of the app and provides a guide to implement features keeping security in mind. The tester also observes the already existing security features and reconsiders the framework for authorization, authentication, data security, audit logging and more such as:

  • Configuration Management Testing
  • Business Logic Testing
  • Session Management Testing
  • Data Validation Testing
  • Denial of Service Testing
  • Web Services Testing
  • Ajax Testing
  • Testing for OWASP top ten vulnerabilities such as XSS, SQL Injection

The above approach increases the development team’s awareness for security vulnerabilities and associated action plans to mitigate them.

Load Testing Services

It is estimated that the global mobile health market is expected to reach USD$37 Bn in 2019. With app publishers releasing apps for health and fitness, which is increasing by the day, the stat mentioned is only going to increase exponentially. In this competitive market testers need to understand the performance characteristics of the app to ensure it delivers the desired result. Hence, testing under severe load conditions becomes an important factor in this marketplace where users are in abundance, probably millions using the app at the same time.

The process of this test effort, generally starts by analysing the application’s architecture, its components, integrated 3rd party services and the expected capability of the device (connectivity, storage usage, cache memory) to be used by the consumer. These factors provides the tester the potential performance choking points that need to be taken into consideration. The information generally pertains to:

  • Scalability Issues – The testers provide information on the scalable capacity of the app which is its capacity to scale up or down according to the number of logged on users and altered architecture

  • Error Rectification – Identifying problems regarding the functioning of the app or elements which may cause a lag in performance. This covers errors due to architecture, software design, hardware capability and all other configurational issues.

  • Measuring Load Curves – These results from a load test gives an idea of how the app is performing under constant flux of load.

  • Page Load Issues which determines the time taken by the page to load the user’s device.

  • Reporting load point, which determines the point at which the server cripples down.

Usability Testing

This form of testing is essential in building various customized user scenarios and features that are unique to the healthcare industry. These instances are built and checked in real-time as well as virtually.

Let’s take a critical case scenario of a senior user who wants to use the condition management facility of his healthcare app – will the patient be able to locate and tap the call button quickly? Would he be able to send an alert to the concerned person? The answers to these questions is ‘it all depends upon how easy it is to use the app’. Usability testing services makes sure that solutions to these critical situations are taken care of with utmost priority.

Usability test serves as a blueprint for the actual performance in real-time. The customized test plan for any healthcare app though doesn’t have a set structure but generally comprises of the test sections mentioned below:

  • Objective and goal of testing
  • Methodical design of the testing process
  • Task list
  • Testing environment
  • Data to be collected and error rectification measures
  • Reporting and presentation

Making your Healthcare App HIPAA Compliant

Healthcare organizations are continuously making necessary advancements due to the rising demand of new healthcare mobile apps. However, it is also essential for developers to have a thorough understanding of HIPAA (Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996) compliance. This compliance outlines the necessary safety precautions and implementations that software developers must adhere to. The act was created to formulate the flow of ePHI (electronically protected health information) and to protect the same from frauds, thefts and unauthorized access. To make your app HIPAA compliant the following needs to be addressed:

Technical safeguards – This comprises of access control, which strongly defines unique user identification, emergency access procedures, automatic logging off from the system and complete encryption. Apart from above, while transmitting ePHI over any network specific security mechanisms must be implemented to ensure that there is no loophole in the transmission.

Physical safeguards – These include facility access control, which allows only those with authorization to access the ePHI. Any distributed stream of devices such as laptops, desktops, tablets and smartphones must be screen protected and logged off before the user leaves.

Administrative safeguards – These manage the development, implementation and maintenance of ePHI protection measures. They also ensure only relevant ePHI data can be accessed and only by authorized users. In case of data breach there must be a backup function that alerts the affected users and authorities.

To ensure the health of your healthcare app, it is advisable to opt-in for independent software testing companies who test and bring in HIPAA compliance. Going the other way might cost you a fortune as initiating from scratch is quite an expensive process. If you are still not able to determine the health of your healthcare app simply request a call back, to see how we can help

Best Practices to Ensure Healthcare Mobile App Security

Best Practices to Ensure Healthcare Mobile App Security

Healthcare Mobile Application Security Services

Healthcare mobile app market has risen exponentially over the years. More than 3,18,000 mobile apps are now live on different app stores and over 200 new apps are being added daily.

The trend is expected to grow even faster with increasing innovation and more enterprises taking the digital route. The convenience of sharing care workflows, enhanced efficiency of practitioners and easy access to data are encouraging providers to give access to health records. Per Goldman Sachs, the digital healthcare revolution with appropriate mobile app security features could save over $300 billion just in America.

However, an increase in the number of healthcare mobile applications is also posing a severe data security issue. IT departments are struggling to keep the data safe while complying with HIPPA – this issue is further deepned when the devices are owned by third parties.

How Severe is the Issue?

Smartphones are online 24*7, in most cases. And mobile devices lack the basic safety net of a computer including firewalls, anti-spam and malware protection.

A data breach will not only leak personal data of patients but it also makes the healthcare organization liable to criminal charges and hefty monetary fines. It has become nearly impossible for enterprises to keep the devices in secure hands. Some of the core challenges herein include:

  • Unwanted access to device and data in the event of loss and theft
  • Difficult to ensure regulatory compliance sanctity
  • Illegal access to healthcare data present on the cloud
  • No or limited lifecycle control over data and devices.
  • Mobile phishing or illegal access through malicious mobile apps

The failure to ensure ironclad data security could lead to unencrypted data losses at a median cost of $147,485 per lapse.

Hence, it has become imperative for healthcare providers to share the right information in a secure manner. Here are a few key steps you can take to ensure end-to-end data security:

Secure the Devices

Unauthorized access can lead to treacherous consequences for service providers. It is essential to put all the devices in or outside of healthcare under the safety net of passcode and biometrics. An efficient lock mechanism will ensure the prevention of illegal access to healthcare data.

Implementation of remote lock and wiping capabilities can help in controlling the fate of the device and data in case of theft. Loss or espionage. GPS tracking capabilities can help in locating and recovering the devices.

Data Encryption

Whatever data is accessed, is stored remotely in a server placed somewhere behind the security of firewalls. However, even the wireless flow of unencrypted data is not secured. As a precaution, it is essential to encrypt the sensitive health data of patients while in motion or at rest. This healthcare mobile application best practice will help plug any data leakage while meeting compliances.

Secured Mobile Application

The risk of intrusion can be prevented through cutting edge mHealth app testing. It will help in identifying bugs and security threats. Data security testing, network security and penetration testing are some of the techniques you can rely on to ensure efficient data security.

Periodic update of mHealth applications helps in plugging loopholes and enhancing mobile app security features on an ongoing basis. This will help in preventing hackers from targeting the loose ends of your mHealth app for a longer period of time.

Save from Other Mobile Applications

It is the IT department’s biggest challenge to keep personal data and applications away from the devices of healthcare professionals. Providers often end up using their devices for personal use which makes them vulnerable to external data threats.

It is essential to restrict users who are using mHealth mobile apps to keep the data protected. As a result, several Fortune 500 enterprises and hospitals have implemented the app and data containment policy. This is executed by running the mHealth application separately to prevent unauthorized access to healthcare data. This preventive wall between personal and patient data ensures reliable data security.

Access to Trusted Apps

Mobile applications present on Google Playstore or iOS App store are not necessarily secured by end-to-end encryption. mHealth developers need to collaborate with relevant app owners to make sure data encryption is enabled.

But why is it done in the first place? It is done to help providers carry on personal tasks too while on these these apps, providing both flexibility and data security.

Like desktop and laptop users, mobile devices should also be provided with access control features. This will allow only authorized providers to gain access to patient data. Additionally only IT should get the right to audit or manage the permissions of users.

Install Security Software

Hackers and viruses can enter mobile devices as easily as they do on computers. Make sure that the device of every provider is equipped with internet security software. It will help in preventing the installation of hazardous apps and malware from entering the healthcare network.

Data Usage Control

Implementation of data usage control not only helps in access control or monitoring; it blocks the suspicious usage of patient data in real-time. Healthcare organizations can leverage this feature to prevent users from executing specific actions including uploading on the internet, unauthorized email conversation, copying the data to external hard disk and printing among others.

Besides, data discovery and classification can be attached with data usage control to ensure sensitive data is identified and prevented from unauthorized use.

Security of Third-party Stakeholders

Several small and midsize healthcare organizations are leveraging the benefits of cloud computing. It offers technology similar to what bigger enterprises are using but at a fraction of the actual cost. Cloud-based solutions have lowered the massive upfront cost of deploying or upgrading the IT infrastructure.

However, this arrangement puts your data in hands of the third party. Hence, it becomes even more important to access and monitor the security of your patient data. mHealth app owners should demand billing verification and the amount of time spent on the company’s server.

Upgrade Tools

Exchange of data can happen through any medium including emails, USB, hard copies and social media. Healthcare enterprises should upgrade their IT infrastructure to cover every touchpoint through which data can be leaked.

Data breaches are more likely to happen if you have an outdated and vulnerable IT setup.

Educate and Implement Strong Policies

One of the best ways to ensure data security is by educating the end-user about the proper use of mobile devices and apps. The implementation of a clear policy framework eliminates grey areas in a BYOD environment.

Here are a few points which you can implement as a part of your policy framework:

  • Implementation of passcode gated data
  • Application containment for mHealth applications
  • Immediate notification to the relevant groups (in most cases the IT department) in the event of theft or loss of device
  • No sideloading of mHealth apps
  • Prohibit the local storage of Protected Health Information (PHI) on devices of providers

Conclusion

The healthcare industry has been suffering from data breaches for a long time. Increasing cases have cost millions of dollars to healthcare enterprises. From hackers stealing the protected identity of patients to providers viewing the details of patients without proper authorization; data breach is happening all over the world.

Aside from losing millions for failing to meet the compliance, cases of the data breach could cost the reputation of your organization as well. With new mobile devices entering your healthcare eco-systems on a regular basis, it is essential to safeguard patient data against potential threats.

Get in touch with us to have access to cutting-edge mHealth application testing services and reduce your data security threats.

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