The Ultimate Benefits of Intelligent Test Automation for Healthcare

To provide the best possible patient care, hospitals need to ensure that their EMR/EHR systems work properly after every change.

While the EMR itself is a critical link in overall patient management, ensuring seamless connectivity across numerous other hospital systems (ERP software, PACS technology, blood bank software) is also important. This means end-to-end testing of software releases, updates, functionality, and performance — not just testing that the code works in one system or another.

A Hot-button Topic: EHR/EMR Testing

At their best, EMRs give physicians data and tools to care for their patients more efficiently and thoroughly than ever before. In fact, 88% of providers reported that their EHR systems brought clinical benefits for the practice. As EHR/EMR systems touch sensitive patient information and involve in the processes bound directly to life-critical cases, they should be thoroughly tested. However, the complexity of EHR/EMR software makes testing a daunting task.

Is this happening to your organization? Your manual testing approach could not keep pace with your EMR vendors' rapid release schedule. It was also painful to manually keep in compliance with reporting, coverage, and release traceability. As the need for security testing ramps up, you were required to ensure that security patches wouldn't affect workflows... The constant testing of updates had caused disruptions to daily operations.

Five Key Considerations for EMR/EHR Testing

Here is just a high-level view of five key areas of your EMR systems that you should be testing:

#1 Functionality

From patient registrations and laboratory records to e-prescriptions and insurance claims, healthcare professionals need EMR systems to function as expected. Issues that affect the functionality of EMR systems hinder medical professionals’ ability to make informed decisions when caring for patients. Therefore, it’s important that any EMR testing plan focuses on the core functionality.

#2 Integration

Critical systems, such as picture archiving and communication systems (PACS), various databases, APIs, and other important systems are all plugged into EMRs.

Increasing test coverage with AI-powered test automation can help ensure these systems are working and talking to each other. This is vital to maintaining a high level of patient care, due to the importance of the data flow for timely and accurate medical decisions.

#3 Regression

Due to the number of critical integrations with your EMR, regression testing helps you ensure that the core software still works after it has changed or interfaced with other applications and platforms.

#4 UI and Usability

The patient experience can deteriorate further if the UI of the EMR is ignored. Testing your EMR's UI from the users’ perspective makes it simpler to determine whether the system delivers an experience that is straightforward and works as expected. So your staff can effectively use the system to do their job and improve patient outcomes,

#5 Performance

Many healthcare professionals across various departments will use your EMR. An array of processes and applications will also be plugged into it, and these can be resource-intensive for your servers. Performance testing will ensure your EMR still performs under peak load and with no downtime, so all users remain productive when accessing the system, even when there is a spike in activity.

A One-for-All Resolution: Intelligent Test Automation

Now is the time to expand testing beyond standard patient journeys with Eggplant to increase patient safety and get complete test coverage for any EMR/EHR application, including Epic, Cerner, Allscripts, Meditech, GE Healthcare, eClinicalWorks, Practice Fusion, athenahealth, and more.

Read this eBook on how Eggplant empowers healthcare organizations with intelligence automation.

Testing the EMR & Beyond email1

https://info.eggplantsoftware.com/automation-intelligence-for-any-emr

Use Eggplant to interface from your EMR to any other system in your hospital, including pharmacy, procurement, insurance, and billing. Save time with auto-test-case generation. Access the Citrix storefront, order labs, check test results, send messages, use a bar-code scanner, log notes, confirm the accuracy of voice dictation, ensure security patches have been applied before running automated tests — Eggplant can do everything that a user who’s sitting in front of a mobile device or workstation can do.

Summary

Software touches all the moving parts of a hospital visit, from admission to diagnosis, treatment, prescriptions, and discharge.

By incorporating an intelligent test automation approach and solutions, you can achieve true, end-to-end automation across systems within very limited time, resource, and budget constraints — and ensure you don’t lose sight of the most important element: your patients.

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