According to a recent report published by Zion Market Research, “Global test automation market is expected to increase from USD 15.87 billion in 2016 to a whopping USD 54.98 billion by 2022”. If this is true, with growing competition in the healthcare industry and increasing trend of digital transformation worldwide,applications are bound to become more complex and testing and quality control, critical. At Aversan, we believe that patient safety, cost-effectiveness and resource optimization are key benefits that test automation can bring in implementation and maintenance of complex healthcare applications.
In May 2018, Mojdeh Toyserkani, Director, Business Development at Aversan presented a poster presentation on “Why Digital Health Needs Automated Testing?” at the 18th annual e-health conference held in Vancouver. The poster was aimed to provide an illustration of how Test Automation can reduce the safety risks posed by industry challenges and is a way better choice in many cases over manual testing in order to achieve quality standards.
To download a copy of our e-poster, click here.
Challenges
- A recent study of e-prescribing systems in hospitals revealed 35% of prescribing errors are software related
- The National Health Service has identified and documented an average of 35 software safety incidents every month.
All these errors could be avoided if better testing was performed.
Research Data
Marketing research conducted to learn about the type and method of testing applied in many healthcare organizations including hospitals in Ontario and British Columbia reveals that primary method of testing in these organizations is still manual testing. Among the concerns we hear are:
- We were not aware of automated method of testing and its associated benefits
- Software vendors do not support automated testing
- Automated testing will add cost
Solution
Solution lies in Test Automation. In software testing, test automation is the use of special software to control the execution of tests and the comparison of actual outcomes with predicted outcomes. Test Automation helps to eliminatehuman errors and deliver premium software quality in time and on budget. It is also a relief from managing complex test environments where interoperability between devices and timing of activities are critical for successful testing. It offloads mundane and repetitive tasks from staff, reduces errors, and results in better breadth and depth of test coverage at a lower cost and with reduced timelines.
Project Background
- Client with ~1000s of Manual Tests: In need to maintain a legacy application
- Application upgrades and enhancements : Never enough time or $$ to complete a full regression, only a subset run regularly
What Aversan did?
- Automated a subset of 270 selected test cases
- Automation effort: 4 weeks, with 2 FTEs
- Automated: 15 hours to run regression (overnight)
- Manual: 300 hours to run regression (business hours)
Results
Lower Project costs by:
- Reducing test cycles – Months to Hours
- Reusing tests for future upgrades
Accelerate Solution Delivery with:
- 24/7 automation
- Reusable test components
Increase Quality and Safety by:
- Improved test coverage
- Eliminating human error
- Detecting un-intended changes
Test Automation Demo on Oscar EMR 15.0
[embedyt] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TRxoYJftu3k[/embedyt]
Conclusions
We believe there needs to be a business case for test automation, in other words a return on investment (ROI). One needs to make the case for the initial investment in the test automation methodology, tools and setup, which then generates a payback based on use.
When calculating the ROI, one needs to look at two types of ROI:
- Patient Safety ROI
- Financial ROI
Considering healthcare applications serve an immensely significant role in the industry, effective testing capabilities of these applications is critical to ensuring quality patient care. Furthermore, the level of execution speed and efficiency required to test complex healthcare applications, regulatory compliance and their interoperability with other devices with 100% accuracy and precision can never be matched by human efforts. Hence, Test Automation is a definite approach to empower development teams to achieve greater optimization and bring digital health applications to market quickly and confidently.
How else can test automation benefit the rapidly advancing healthcare industry? Leave us a comment below or reach out to us at – media@aversan.com
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