As a healthcare professional, you understand the vital role the EHR plays in providing higher quality and safer patient care while helping achieve efficiency and business optimization goals.
The EHR acts as the technological heart of a health system, and practically every department relies on it in some manner to keep things beating. But when we look in the rearview mirror, we see the shifts in the role of technology for healthcare.
The Vital Role of the EHR
In the not-too-distant past, healthcare documented everything in an analog fashion. Remember paper patient medical charts, paper test results, paper everything. EHRs have been around since the mid-1960s, but didn’t move out of the experimental phase until the late 1980s.
With the passage of the HITECH Act in 2009, healthcare was incentivized to adopt EHRs, and the journey to widespread adoption began.
We have made significant collective advancements in technology since then. Although the healthcare industry has been slower to take on digital transformation than other sectors, EHRs represent one key area of progress.
Today, the vast majority of hospitals and office-based physicians have an EHR, enabling better healthcare delivery, interoperability, and operational efficiency. What’s more, a host of third-party and enterprise applications join the EHR to (ideally) enhance the technology infrastructure of a given organization.
Why EHR and Enterprise Application Testing Is Important
EHR systems contain a plethora of patient data that helps inform provider decisions, which is why every patient workflow needs to be tested before a go-live or upgrade to ensure it works as intended. This includes testing that every related application is connected and functioning properly.
If you don’t thoroughly test, it can compromise patient safety and privacy and create risk for your organization.
For example, a patient with multiple medical conditions sees several specialists to manage their health. They are prescribed a drug by a provider to treat one of these conditions. If the patient workflow for contraindications does not function properly, the provider will not be notified, and the patient may start taking a drug that puts them at serious risk. According to a study by Leapfrog Group and Johns Hopkins, an estimated 160,000 lives are lost each year to avoidable medical errors like this.
A Near-Fatal Seizure
Pew states that some EHR vendors “…often do not thoroughly examine safety implications, including those that arise from particular procedures within facilities or through customizations. As a result, usability issues can go undetected until they cause patients harm.”
This was the case for a 16-year-old California boy who was given an antibiotic dose 38 times larger than the physician intended and who suffered a near-fatal seizure as a result.
Although the technology delivered an accurate prescription based on the information entered into the EHR, the physician did not realize that “the system’s settings multiplied the requested medication amount by the patient’s weight.”
If the health system had properly tested detailed patient workflows prior to go-live, they would have seen how their workflow settings needed to be adjusted in order to prevent dosage mistakes like this.
It is critical to test your EHR, third-party, and enterprise applications to ensure patient safety and privacy, and to mitigate risk.
SureTest Rapidly Transforms Manual Testing to Automation
We created SureTest’s Managed Test Automation Solution to meet the unique challenges and requirements of healthcare that standard test automation does not take into account.
How It Works
Your health system is similar to a large tree, with patients like nutrients moving through it. Most hospitals run time-consuming, redundant tests from the roots to the tips of each “branch” or potential patient journey. Each of these workflows must be tested and any change in any step of a workflow requires testing from “root to branch” repeatedly.
With SureTest’s turnkey managed Test Automation Solution, you can relieve your staff from up to 80% or more of the manual testing activities so they can focus on other strategic initiatives.
Features of the SureTest solution include:
- SureWorks® Library is our extensive collection of over 2,500 automated test scripts that jumpstarts the speed of customized development and provides end-to-end integrated and regression testing.
- SurePersona® Engine is your customized library of automation. It is a powerful tool that knows and emulates the exact functions each team member needs to employ for each use case and performs them with astounding speed and precision every time.
- The SureMethod® Framework was carefully developed by our team of seasoned healthcare domain specialists and is the bedrock for each test automation sequence we deploy. This framework means you realize continuous testing, robust script maintenance, and real-time reporting.
SureTest – The Only Healthcare Managed Test Automation Solution
With SureTest, test automation is not a “one-and-done” event. The SureTest Test Automation team continually monitors, maintains, and develops your test scripts, so they stay current. We handle any issues so your team can focus on patient care delivery, higher-value tasks, and strategic projects. SureTest ensures quality while making test automation a light lift for your team.
For example, while implementing automation, Erlanger Health System experienced a 98% reduction in time spent on manual testing. This has resulted in improved employee morale by allowing their staff to focus on their primary jobs and other strategic projects.
That’s why we’re proud to earn an A+ from KLAS Research across all Key Performance Indicators. Customers polled in the report cited SureTest’s support:
“…Their support and willingness to bend over backward to ensure they are providing the best service they can is phenomenal. I wish other vendors were more like SureTest.”
Learn More
Continuous testing is critical, and getting it right saves lives.
SureTest is here to make it happen for your healthcare organization while making it extremely easy for your team.
Learn more about how SureTest helps you realize phenomenal speed to value and solid ROI in the first year here.