Last updated on April 7th, 2024 at 10:30 am

Due to the growing demand for interoperability, regulatory compliance, and end-user technology compliance, the healthcare system has experienced significant improvements over the last few years. Technology has become a big transformation stage in this field, in which people develop apps to provide faster service anytime and anywhere.

Quality and speed are two elements that help make the service of the healthcare sector more effective. Digitization is one of the most significant breakthroughs seen by this sector. It gives excellent comfort to experts to deliver their services from a far distance or remotely. The increasing number of healthcare products like applications and wearables have created more demand in the market. Even it had a tremendous impact on the economy.

Moreover, healthcare industries use many medical devices, such as MRI machines, X-ray machines, CT scanners, thermometers, glucose monitors, etc. All of these devices are controlled by various regulatory authorities to meet a set of requirements and standards. One error in healthcare devices can hotch-potch the life of patients. The regulatory bodies need to provide reliable readings, effective performance to health sufferers; otherwise, it would be hard for them to recover from severe diseases. Therefore, it is crucial for healthcare systems to consider robust healthcare software testing. The proper device or medical testing strategy can ensure the quality and accuracy of products.

Role of Software Testing in the Healthcare Sector

It is necessary for healthcare applications and products to ensure that the software is appropriate to deliver efficient service and the required performance on-time. For example,  the hospital application aims to help patients generate reports with a secure login system. The app must be functional to deliver accurate and required services all the time.

In this case, there is functional testing to get quality assurance in healthcare. It is a type of software testing that helps verify business workflows and take necessary performance measures to achieve the desired results. Functional testing is useful to observe the strategy, plan, and evaluate each defined parameter. By performing functional-based software testing in the healthcare domain, one can obtain the highest-quality output through shorter development lifecycles.

Similarly, automation testing companies use several test automation tools to help healthcare industries save their efforts, time, resources, and money. So, if you are feeling confused regarding how test automation gives aid to healthcare software QA teams, then you need to check the information below.

What is Test Automation & How It is Beneficial for Healthcare Applications?

Test automation is a method of running tests automatically with the use of automation software. It helps manage and execute  tests. It is useful to compare actual test results with expected or predicted outcomes. With test automation, healthcare software QA teams can easily manage test data. They can analyze the test results to enhance the quality of medical devices and applications.

Test automation can offer more test coverage to implement the right test cases for healthcare applications. It is crucial to eliminate repetitive tasks and manage data flow between systems. It is best suited for user-interface testing and executing faster product releases. It helps capture errors faster in the development cycle.

Here are the benefits of test automation for healthcare systems:

Data-Driven Tests

Healthcare applications’ purpose is to deal with individual patient details, like phone numbers, names, gender, and DOB. QA healthcare teams can’t remove full errors from the app during test execution, mainly when considering manual testing.

By implementing data-driven automation frameworks to software testing activities, companies can improve their production of test data. One can generate a large set of data and utilize it for multiple test executions.

Authentication and Authorization Validation

Automation testing companies use test automation tools to focus on valid and invalid test data of the applications. They check whether the application’s user authentication features perform all functions as per the requirement or not. Implementing software testing in the healthcare domain is necessary to keep the sensitive patient’s data safe and other health-related information.

Several technologies and programming languages are used to design and develop healthcare applications. The surprising thing is such apps are easily hackable. That’s why companies today prioritize security and penetration testing more than other healthcare testing services. Both penetration and security tests help to make the app hack-proof and survivable for challenging digital scenarios.

For healthcare industries, the QA team takes care of the HIPAA (Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act) compliance methods to protect the software from intruders. It offers many privacy and security features for all kinds of health-related data and information. HIPAA compliance’s major components are encryption, authorization, authenticity, data usage, accessibility, and structuring. Medical device testing or software testing can help fulfill these standards.

Audit Trails Verification

Record requests and unauthorized login attempts issues occur with most of the online applications. Furthermore, audit trails include a vast amount of data and making it impossible for testers to execute the proper test with manual testing.

In this case, healthcare application testing needs automated test scripts to allow engineers to track the fake user IDs and unwanted behavior. It is easy to test use cases with test automation. It allows for proper recording and can check the unique instances of suspicious activity.

Repetitive Test Execution

Business owners of healthcare systems perform repeated actions on the same system. On the other hand, patients are dependent on the application to satisfy their requirements. If the test cases focus on repetitive behavior, it can result in mistakes when performed manually.

Test automation helps QA testers run their test cases as per their desire to offer accuracy in the application.

Verification of Multiple-Platforms

The goal of healthcare domain testing is to ensure that the software application performs as per the expectation. With manual testing, one can make the app compatible with all browsers, devices, and operating systems. But, it wastes a lot of time and resources.

With automated testing, companies can test healthcare software with ease and make it ready for different platforms, browsers, or relevant platforms.

Proper Report Verification

Applications generate reports in multiple formats, such as PDF, HTML, text and CSV. It provides useful insights to measure the performance of the apps.

With the right automation functional testing tools, one can automatically test the reports, verify these formats to resolve the issues quickly from the healthcare systems.

Integration Support

The Healthcare sector comprises various modules and forms, such as the provider, insurer, the policyholder, TPA, broker, hospital, patient, and regulatory body domain.

Healthcare software testing company performs integration tests on software to ensure that the entire medical web applications, mobile devices, and dependent devices will integrate well and work based on the industry’s requirement.

Big Data Testing

The Healthcare sector contains a ton of patient information. Such information is essential for associated segments and healthcare institutions to build relevant products and devise the right strategy. Big data solutions are executed to obtain accurate interferences and data points.

It helps make informed decisions regarding disease cure, drug inventions, research and development of the healthcare field. Big data includes large datasets that analyze computationally for the extraction of patterns, associations, and trends, specifically that are related to human nature. To run the big data solution with the organization ecosystem, big data testing requires a flawless implementation to provide expected results.

Usability Testing

Usability testing plays a significant role in the healthcare sector. Usability testing is a process wherein users try to complete tasks with a service or product. Similarly, observers also stay present to analyze the users and understand their failure or success process while completing the task. They also track the user’s body language, their reactions, and their usability issues at the time of running any application.

Moreover, there are many features and user scenarios that nurses and pharmacists face during their working hours. Automation testing companies help solve these problems in a better way. They have access to free and open-source tools that they use to simplify the tedious process of healthcare. In software testing, many usability testing methods are acknowledged to improve the user experience and the user interface of healthcare-related devices and apps.

In Conclusion

Interoperability of devices, patient data security, good turnaround time, secure interface for the applications, and efficient performance are some key elements that the medical sector has to deal with regularly. Testing and quality assurance can help organizations deliver expected results to the patients. There is a big market for healthcare technology products. A recent report by MarketsandMarkets predicts that the wireless healthcare market will be worth USD 110.12 billion by 2020.

To get the desired market share, healthcare product companies need to have the right healthcare testing strategy in their hands. There are various testing types considered by healthcare domain testing companies to increase the importance, security, and quality of critical healthcare systems.