Basics of Healthcare Software Testing

Last updated on April 7th, 2024 at 10:47 am

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Healthcare industry is traversing on the edges, given the high number of patients and the short supply of medical professionals and equipment, however, with the onslaught of covid’19, healthcare is one of the top industries to feel the strain. As the number of patients is increasing exponentially every day, medical professionals across the globe are struggling to not only contain the virus but to also provide adequate treatment to patients ailed with other major diseases.  Similar to others, the answer to the issues prevailing in the healthcare industry is the increased use of digitization and automation. Therefore, over the past few years, there has been a sudden spike in the growth and development of healthcare applications. These apps not only allow greater access to a much larger population as before, especially given the ease of access and low costs but also free up a lot of hospital equipment which is usually tied up in non-emergency care. Owing to this, the reliance of doctors and patients across the board on these healthcare applications, the market for medical software is growing at a rapid pace.

Also read: Best Software Testing Companies

Testing Healthcare Applications

Considering that in comparison to other typical applications the stakes for medical apps are much higher – as something as simple as wrong administration of medicine could cost a patient their life – the quality standards and requirements for healthcare apps are much more stringent. This is largely why software testing tools are generally a prerequisite in the software development lifecycle for these applications. Providing remote healthcare facilities to patients can be highly convenient and equally rewarding, from automated administrative activities that save time for doctors to facilitating patients in emergencies. However, it comes with its own fair share of risks. In order to provide a smooth user experience to customers without any glitches, it is important for companies to make sure that all components function properly separately and in conjunction as well. The development and the quality assurance teams have to work together to ensure that every aspect, including network connection, firmware, operating system, various environments, come together to form high quality and adequately functioning applications.

Essential Testing Features for E-medical Apps

The increasing demand for end-user technology (multiple OS, mobile) compliance, interoperability, and regulatory compliance has put further pressure on organizations to incorporate software testing tools from the initial phases. As opposed to the testing approaches in traditional waterfall approaches, software testing in agile driven teams and organizations requires in-depth technical expertise and a significant amount of time and resources allocated to testing processes. Some of the ley automation testing services for healthcare applications for companies today comprise of;

Platform testing – this type of testing is generally performed on medical application to evaluate the cross browser compatibility of the system and to check the functionality of the application on different platforms.

Medical Imaging testing – specialized test automation practices and techniques are utilized in this form of testing to assess the functionality of medical imaging features of apps, including MESA, DVTK, Mirth, etc.

Performance testing – the performance aspect of these applications is extremely important, and the success of the app is highly contingent on this feature. Therefore, this type of testing assesses and gauges the performance readiness of the system and its ability for capacity planning, and continuous monitoring and support. The local data size, archival strategy, scalability, and overall reliability of the application is tested.

Security and compliance testing – Large volumes of sensitive data about the patients is stored in healthcare applications, which is why they are primarily targeted by threat actors. Hence, it is imperative for the teams to verify and validate the existing security measures of applications like data encryption. This will help them to detect any security gaps or vulnerabilities in the system and resolve them before they are passed onto customers.

Conclusion

For healthcare applications, it is pertinent to process and make sense of a large number of transactions that are performed concurrently, and patient data every day. In order to make sure that this huge volume of the sensitive database is handled appropriately over a period of time, the testing teams are required to generate test cases that represent scenarios with varying complexities.

In the technology-dependent world today, it is next to impossible for healthcare organizations to function without adept medical applications. This is why it is imperative for them to develop and maintain the quality standards which ensure great user experience, and secure and efficient applications, that are capable of handling large amounts of data.