What are the Best Practices in Healthcare Software Testing?

Quality plays a critical role in the healthcare sector, with the lives of patients depending on the smooth and accurate functioning of healthcare products. Any healthcare equipment driven by embedded software needs to provide accurate results to the end-users under all circumstances. The stakes are so high for healthcare software that any bug or vulnerability or non-adherence to HIPAA standards can invite expensive legal suits, not to mention endangering the lives of patients. Healthcare software sans gaps should ensure the privacy and security of patients’ data. The gaps can make the software vulnerable to hacking or transmit insufficient/inaccurate data or information when stakeholders need it the most. For example, a CT or EEG scan connected to a critical patient needs to generate accurate results to enable the healthcare specialist to make a correct diagnosis and prescribe treatment.

Further, care delivery in today’s healthcare sector depends on two parameters – speed of execution and quality. As the sector evolves with the advent of new technologies and innovations, there is heightened communication among healthcare specialists, other staff, and patients based on the data generated by devices. Hence, healthcare software testing should form an integral part of the value chain for reasons such as performing advanced analytics, understanding the benefits of innovation, improving the performance of healthcare products, or making sound investments.

Testing challenges of healthcare software

The various challenges faced by QA professionals in executing healthcare application testing are:

• To address the needs of multiple users, such as patients, caregivers, administrative staff, insurers, and other stakeholders
• To establish the standard for security and compliance with HIPAA
• To adhere to the process and interoperability standards

What are the best practices for healthcare software testing?

To ensure the accuracy and precision of healthcare products, healthcare QA testing should follow the below-mentioned best testing practices:

Domain expertise: Given the healthcare software’s requirement to support multiple workflows, a complex architecture, and a humongous volume of data, the QA professionals testing the software must have domain expertise. This includes understanding business workflows and having the ability to identify the root cause of any software issue. Testers without domain expertise take more time to understand the working of the system rather than testing the software for critical defects.

Planning test strategy and requirement gathering: Standard QA procedures are not sufficient to conduct healthcare domain testing, because it involves specific requirements. This is to ensure the healthcare product complies with regulatory requirements such as HIPAA, integrates seamlessly with the healthcare infrastructure, shows user-friendliness, and offers security and data privacy. Besides, testing requirements should address the needs of all users; healthcare providers (hospitals, medical centers, and clinics), patients, vendors, regulatory authorities, and intermediaries (insurers.)

Setting security standards: Due to healthcare products’ critical role in saving the lives of patients, they are subjected to stringent regulatory standards. Regulatory bodies such as the FDA and HIPAA are very strict about ensuring the security and privacy of patients’ data. However, not all healthcare compliance testing conforms to standards such as FDA, DICOM, HL7, ISO, and CMMI, resulting in security issues and gaps left unaddressed. The below-mentioned steps can help set up security standards for healthcare software applications.

• Every test case should focus on the healthcare standards to be complied with.
• Conduct end-to-end healthcare software testing to secure data such as billing records and medical details.
• Train manual testers on various healthcare standards so that they can identify issues during healthcare QA testing.

Utilize a testing framework: Any healthcare domain testing involves a lot of areas, such as patient apps, payer systems, medical device software, and clinical documentation, among others. Also, testing such software without adhering to the rules or guidelines for test cases can lead to errors, missed steps, and the wrong allocation of time, effort, and resources. So, it is important to implement a comprehensive testing framework to ensure the software undergoes functional testing, authentication validation, data-driven testing, repetitive testing, report verification, and multi-platform verification.

Documentation: This should be done from the beginning of QA testing and continued throughout the SDLC. Begin with defining the rules for documentation, developing a standard template for each document, and relying on such documentation to supply key information.

Conclusion

The best healthcare product can only be achieved when the QA and development teams are working in sync. This is to be done by creating an agile working environment where every team member across functions considers himself or herself to be a part of one project. Hence, implementing agile techniques for digital transformation in healthcare can reduce gaps, improve precision in output, and achieve end-user satisfaction across functions.

James Daniel is a software Tech enthusiastic & works at Cigniti Technologies I'm having a great understanding of today's software testing quality