How critical is Software Quality Assurance in healthcare?

The healthcare industry has evolved over the years to include the latest technologies for accurate diagnosis, prognosis, treatment, and rehabilitation. In modern hospitals, highly sophisticated machines are used with the latest embedded software to diagnose and treat patients. It is important that the software should be quality assured to ensure the results generated by the sophisticated equipment are 100% accurate. For should there be any inaccuracies in the readings, the entire treatment protocol can go haywire and the patients’ life itself could be in danger. This makes QA software testing such a critical component in the manufacturing and maintenance of medical apps and devices.

With increased digitization, the healthcare industry is increasingly using sensor-embedded mobile devices to check the health stats of individuals remotely. While this is a great initiative, a lot depends on how the mobile app or any other accessory works to give the most accurate results about the health stats of an individual. To make this happen, rigorous healthcare application testing is necessary. Moreover, as we move more towards an Internet-based health delivery system, there is a greater need to conduct healthcare QA testing and healthcare app security testing to ensure complete data security as well as accuracy of the readings.

Also, certain factors are needed to be considered when you are looking to offer a hundred percent software quality assurance for medical devices. Some of these are as follows.

1. Interoperability of various health devices: To get highly accurate diagnostic results, doctors and paramedics depend on a number of sophisticated devices such as MRI, CT Scan, EEG, etc. These should possess greater interoperability to be able to provide a comprehensive healthcare report of individual patients. Interoperability thorough healthcare software testing ensures multiple devices using different platforms to easily access each other’s data and fulfill the required security compliance related to data privacy.
2. How good the application is: To deliver quality outcomes for the healthcare app, its attributes like functionality, performance, security, and usability, among others, ought to be tested meticulously. Comprehensive testing of an app is a highly specialized job that requires a huge amount of domain knowledge and experience. This is where the role of a reputed software quality assurance company with years of experience in testing software and applications comes into play.
3. Security of the healthcare application: When businesses strategize about developing healthcare related apps for people on-the-go, the issue of cybersecurity in healthcare comes into focus. As very sensitive personal data related to patients are shared through the online platform, it becomes imperative to make the entire ecosystem hack-proof. To do this in a systematic way, penetration testing becomes essential. It ensures hidden glitches and vulnerabilities are identified and the app is made compliant with safety protocols like HIPAA.
4. Making a sense out of compiled data: A huge amount of data gets generated through various sensors, diagnostic tools, as well as, healthcare applications. To make some sense out of this mountain of data, these should be compiled and presented to the healthcare experts in an easy-to-understand way. This allows doctors to make a quick and accurate assessment of the patient’s health condition and decide the line of treatment. Here, big data analysis can play a critical role. It analyses the data generated through various diagnostic tools to deliver the right inference for doctors to make correct diagnosis.
5. Cutting down on complexities: In any modern hospital, the entire healthcare system is highly centralized where the data related to patients can be accessed by authorized persons for various medical as well as administrative needs. These may include nurses looking to deliver the right medicinal dosage to the patient, the pharmacist looking for the right generic combination of medicine available in his or her stock, or the administrative staff preparing the bill. Here, high quality software assurance can provide a seamless interaction between the stakeholders and the healthcare system to offer a holistic experience.

Conclusion

The above-mentioned reasons highlight the criticality of comprehensive software assurance of medical devices for delivering high-quality healthcare services to the patients. Remember, any flaw in the software system can generate erroneous output, which may lead the healthcare expect to conduct wrong diagnosis and treatment. Thus, it is imperative that there should be no loose threads in the strategy for testing embedded software in diagnostic tools and healthcare applications to ensure their accuracy and seamless functioning.

Michael works for Cigniti Technologies, which is the world's first Independent Software Testing Company to be appraised at CMMI-SVC Level 5, and an ISO 9001:2008 & ISO 27001:2013 certified organization.