Healthcare digitalization is revolutionizing the industry, making it easier for providers to store, transfer, and analyze critical data. However, the success of digitalization depends on quality assurance practices adopted and implemented Digitalization has revolutionized how healthcare services are provided and accessed, but quality assurance helps in taking it to the next level.
Quality assurance can ensure that healthcare digitalization is secure and reliable, while providing a highly personalized patient experience. With quality assurance practices in place, healthcare digitalization can become a more efficient and cost-effective for providers and patients.
The best healthcare companies are responding to disruption with digital and innovation initiatives that enable new business models, address the challenges of increasing demand and escalating costs.
– Gartner
In recent years, healthcare technology has grown tremendously, but it is not flawless and requires continuous testing as part of its delivery pipeline. An organization should employ and implement a robust quality assurance program to minimize technical errors and to ensure the safety of patients.
Providing value-based care, and outcome-based medicine has made quality assurance work across the system an absolute necessity to develop policies and procedures promoting the best possible outcome for patients.
QA ensures that digital products meet the highest standards of safety and performance, minimizing the risk of data breaches, errors, and software malfunctions. Healthcare providers can also benefit from quality assurance by identifying potential issues and addressing them before they arise.
Want to drive Digital Disruption through ‘Smart Testing’
Benefits of Quality Assured Healthcare Digitalization
When implemented correctly, healthcare digitalization can revolutionize how we deliver quality healthcare. One of the key benefits of the digital transformation of healthcare is the ability to collect, analyze, and share vast amounts of patient data in real time. This enables healthcare providers to gain insights into patient health trends, make more informed diagnoses and treatment decisions, and improve patient outcomes.
Other digital technologies transforming healthcare include wearables that track patient health metrics, mobile apps that help patients manage their conditions and medications, and AI-powered analytics that help identify at-risk patients and improve clinical decision-making.
By incorporating quality assurance into the healthcare digitalization process, hospitals and other healthcare organizations can ensure that the systems they are implementing are secure, reliable, and easy to use. Quality assurance can help ensure that healthcare digitalization is successful, safer, and more efficient for everyone involved.
Technology trends in the healthcare Industry
The healthcare industry constantly evolves, and technology is critical in this transformation. Some of the key technology trends in the healthcare industry include:
- Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML): AI and ML are being used in healthcare to analyze large amounts of data, identify patterns, and make predictions. AI and ML technologies are increasingly getting popular in drug discovery, medical imaging, and patient risk assessment.
- Telemedicine: Telemedicine refers to the use of technology to deliver healthcare remotely. This includes virtual consultations, remote monitoring of patients, and the use of mobile health apps.
- Wearables: Wearables are devices that are worn on the body and track various health metrics. This technology is being used to monitor patients with chronic conditions, track physical activity, and improve patient outcomes.
- Blockchain: Blockchain technology is being used to secure and share medical data. This technology can improve the security and privacy of patient data and help reduce fraud and errors.
- 3D Printing: 3D printing is being used in healthcare to create customized implants, prosthetics, and medical devices. This technology can improve patient outcomes by creating more precise and effective solutions.
- Internet of Things (IoT): IoT technology connects devices and sensors to the internet, allowing for real-time monitoring and data collection. This technology is being used in healthcare to monitor patient health, track medication adherence, and improve patient outcomes.
- Augmented Reality (AR) and Virtual Reality (VR): AR and VR are being used in healthcare to provide immersive training for healthcare professionals, simulate surgical procedures, and help patients understand their medical conditions.
Challenges of Healthcare Digitalization
Healthcare digitalization has the potential to revolutionize the industry by providing more efficient and cost-effective care. However, this process is not without its challenges. Quality assurance is a critical factor in making sure that digital solutions are beneficial and meet the needs of the healthcare industry. The healthcare industry has witnessed significant technological advancements in recent years. However, these advancements have come with their unique challenges. Some of the technology challenges in the healthcare industry include:
- Interoperability: Healthcare organizations use different software applications and systems that are incompatible. This lack of interoperability leads to difficulties in sharing patient data between healthcare providers, resulting in errors in diagnosis and treatment.
- Cybersecurity: With the adoption of electronic health records (EHRs), healthcare organizations face the risk of cyber-attacks and data breaches. Such attacks can lead to the loss or theft of sensitive patient information, resulting in legal and financial implications for healthcare providers.
- Data Management: Healthcare organizations generate vast amounts of data that require proper management, storage, and analysis. The challenge here is to ensure that the data is accurate, timely, and accessible for decision-making purposes.
- Wearable testing – Hardware + Software testing – Testing wearable devices add an additional dimension. It is essential to not only test within the limits of hardware capabilities, but also take into consideration a variety of environmental conditions that are not yet simulated using emulators, simulations, or automated testing. Testers will have to devise new scenarios for testing wearable devices since consumers will use them differently from other types of mobile devices. An important aspect of testing is to determine how the device will interact with other devices.
Quality Assurance and its Role in Revamping Healthcare Digitalization
Quality assurance (QA) is a crucial component of any digitalization effort in healthcare. As the healthcare industry continues to shift towards digitalization, the role of QA becomes even more important to ensure the reliability, accuracy, and security of digital healthcare systems.
The primary role of QA in revamping healthcare digitalization is to ensure that all digital solutions are tested, verified, and validated before they are implemented. This includes testing for functionality, usability, security, and compatibility with other systems. QA also ensures that all digital healthcare systems comply with regulatory requirements and industry standards.
Here are some ways in which quality assurance can help in the digitalization of healthcare:
- Ensuring regulatory compliance
As part of its regulatory functions, the regulatory bodies ensure medical devices are safe and effective throughout their total product lifecycle. Quality products are also important to these regulatory bodies. Audits may occur at any time. Quality audits are recommended by the FDA every 12 months. It’s always best to be audit-ready!
Digital transformation is driven by Agile and DevOps, which ensure compliance with regulatory requirements. The quality of each software is verified by Enhops experts’ team and will make sure that product is quality compliant.
- Safeguarding sensitive patient data
There is a great deal of privacy and security required when dealing with healthcare applications, as they involve sensitive information relating to an individual’s health. An intrusion into the system may leak sensitive data, resulting in a deterioration of trust.
Ponemon’s report estimates that healthcare incidents are the costliest data breaches, costing millions. As a result of a data breach, healthcare organizations not only lose money, but they also lose the trust of their patients. Due to the huge amount of medical data, performance and security testing are imperative for making the system hack proof. To achieve that, you cannot postpone Security testing until the end of the development process.
Your testing needs to be shifted to the left. By providing an effective means for testing in parallel to development processes, Enhops helps you Shift Left your security testing as well, enabling faster, better, and higher quality applications.
- Support the IoT and Device Interoperability
The Internet of Things (IoT) has the potential to revolutionize patient care, improve outcomes, and reduce costs. By connecting medical devices and equipment to the internet, healthcare providers can monitor patients remotely, automate routine tasks, and collect valuable data for analysis.
However, with this increased connectivity comes the challenge of device interoperability. Different devices may use different communication protocols or data formats, making it difficult to exchange data seamlessly. This is where Quality Assurance (QA) can play a crucial role in supporting IoT and device interoperability in healthcare.
- Enhance User Experience by UI Testing
The development of wearable devices is one of the most exciting frontiers of UX and usability testing in healthcare. Second one is “chatbots”. Because of the prevalence of mobile phones and wearables, these two innovations have now empowered users in other fields and will certainly enhance patient and medical personnel interaction and comfort.
Here are some ways UI testing can enhance user experience in the healthcare industry:
- Improving accessibility: UI testing can ensure that healthcare applications and systems are accessible to all users, regardless of their physical abilities. This can involve testing for keyboard accessibility, screen reader compatibility, and color contrast ratios.
- Enhancing usability: UI testing can identify usability issues that could impact the user experience, such as confusing navigation, inconsistent design, or inefficient workflows. This can involve user testing to understand how users interact with the system and to identify areas for improvement.
- Ensuring consistency: UI testing can ensure that the user interface is consistent across different devices, platforms, and languages. This can involve testing for responsive design, localization, and device-specific features.
- Enhancing visual design: UI testing can ensure that the visual design of healthcare applications and systems is appealing, engaging, and consistent with the brand. This can involve testing for typography, layout, color, and imagery.
- Improving performance: UI testing can identify performance issues that could impact the user experience, such as slow load times or unresponsive interfaces. This can involve testing for network latency, device memory usage, and other performance metrics.
- Enhance Application Performance by Functionality Validation
In the healthcare industry, application performance is critical for providing quality patient care and ensuring efficient workflows. Functionality validation is a crucial aspect of software development that can help enhance application performance in healthcare.
Here are some specific ways to enhance application performance by functionality validation in the healthcare industry:
- Validating functional requirements
- Validating user workflows
- Validating system integrations
- Validating data accuracy
- Validating security measures
Reimagining the future of Quality Assurance in Healthcare Industry
Investing in a proactive quality management strategy can generate value for pharmaceutical and medical technology companies that go beyond regulatory compliance. Technological advancements have allowed us to deliver quality in a fundamentally new manner. It is now possible for pharmaceutical and medical technology companies to implement a comprehensive approach that extends far beyond compliance and execution.
In order to achieve this vision, a paradigm shift would need to take place from treating quality compliance as part of the business process to treating quality as a means of creating enterprise value. By combining modern process design techniques with advanced technologies, a “smart quality” framework can help companies rethink how quality is managed.
This framework can help organizations to better manage quality through efficient and effective processes, like predictive analytics and artificial intelligence which can automate quality control. Additionally, this shift can also help companies create an environment of continuous improvement, allowing them to identify and address issues before they become costly problems.
“Smart Quality” is a concept that involves reimagining the way quality works in healthcare. It is a data-driven approach that leverages technology and analytics to improve healthcare quality and outcomes. Smart quality goes beyond traditional quality assurance methods and emphasizes proactive monitoring, continuous improvement, and stakeholder collaboration.
The key components of Smart Quality Assurance practices for healthcare organizations can be:
Quality 4.0 – Quality 4.0 gives quality assurance and software testing several new angles. Right from combining the software development lifecycle data and ensuring the right feedback loops are integrated, it helps healthcare companies in optimizing their current applications. It combines testing practices with AI-ML, No-Code and Low-Code platforms, and predictive maintenance capabilities. This helps in creating innovative practices for healthcare organizations to release high quality applications.
Scriptless Test Automation – Test automation facilitates the coding of test scripts and prevents QA bottlenecks by working in parallel with development. Using low-code/no-code approaches, enterprises can deliver software efficiently by maximizing reuse and minimizing hand-coding requirements. Having your test cases designed, validated, and executed automatically allows you to scale up while maintaining the quality of your tests.
Enhops is partnered with the leading test automation platform Ranorex. This partnership strengthens our commitment towards providing exceptional Quality Assurance and Software Testing services to our clients. Ranorex’s partnership enables us to help clients automate their software testing by providing a powerful combination of easy-to-use low-code and no-code frameworks. To know in details, talk to our experts.
DevTestOps – DevTesOps is widely accepted across various organizations. DevTestOps integrates testing in true sense in DevOps. It allows healthcare engineering teams to quickly detect any anomalies or problems that may arise, giving them the opportunity to address them before they become bigger issues and help in aiding Regulatory Compliance and Information Security Initiatives.
ETL Testing – No doubt, healthcare data represents the new treasure trove of information. The multiple sources include electronic health records (EHRs), claims data, patient feedback, and others. ETL process makes sense of the collected data by converting it to meaningful data and loading it to the target destination. While there are numerous standards for data interchange and maturity, the fact remains that data from disparate systems continue to face interoperability issues. The ETL testing is, therefore, an essential part of determining the integrity and reliability of data that would, in most cases, be used to make health care decisions.
Measuring KPIs – Key performance indicators are measurable values that show how effectively an activity, process, product, or service is functioning. To improve your software’s quality, you can use these measurements to determine whether your software is optimized and, if not, what needs to be changed. To assess your software’s reliability, efficiency, security, and maintainability, several KPIs can be employed. A key component of measuring the success of your healthcare product/app is understanding user engagement, satisfaction, and product/app performance.
Collaboration and Communication among Stakeholders – This includes patients, healthcare providers, insurers, and other stakeholders. By working together, stakeholders can identify areas of improvement and develop solutions that address the root causes of quality issues.
Smart quality also emphasizes the use of technology to automate quality processes and reduce the burden on healthcare providers. This includes the use of predictive analytics to identify potential issues before they occur, automated alerts and notifications to alert providers to potential quality issues, and real-time monitoring of quality metrics to track progress and identify opportunities for improvement.
Chart a new roadmap with Enhops Quality Assurance Services
Quality assurance plays a pivotal role in improving patient safety and health outcomes while operating efficiently, effectively, and in accordance with regulatory requirements. We help companies to apply smart quality principles to quality assurance to increase return on investment outweighing the investment in new systems, including line-of-sight impacts on profit, improvement in time to market, and improved manufacturing and supply chain reliability.
Get in touch with our experts to learn more about how rethinking quality assurance can significantly reduce quality risks, improve your organization’s speed and effectiveness in handling issues, and find long-term financial benefits.
