When most people hear “test automation,” they usually think they can achieve the most benefit through major implementations and upgrades. But test automation can also be used across a remarkably wide range of healthcare IT systems and day to day scenarios.
While the advantages of test automation for major implementations like EHRs are well documented, it can also be used to support specific departmental or application testing such as pharmacy, ancillary clinical, and RCM applications.
Test Automation 101: This isn’t an Elective
Any application used in healthcare needs thorough testing to ensure it’s functioning the right way and as the workflow is intended from the design and build. Without thorough testing, you’re asking for trouble.
SureTest’s Test Automation Solution is test automation on steroids. It’s powerful, fast, incredibly efficient, and can be applied to any third-party application. SureTest can automate any application workflow that uses a keyboard, mouse, or a click on a mobile device.
The SureTest Solution can eradicate up to 80% or more of your manual testing activities, so your team gains back thousands of hours every year.
The result? You gain next-level operational efficiency and phenomenal ROI. Your pharmacy, clinical, RCM, enterprise systems and other teams gain the freedom to focus on their primary job functions.
Surround System Testing Enables Your Pharmacy Teams to Keep Up
Pharmacy teams perform a tightrope routine, balancing quality patient care while dealing with the pressures of efficiency. And these days, they’re responsible for more than ever, including clinical services such as COVID-19 testing, immunizations and more.
The pandemic has caused a severe worker shortage in the pharmacy space, with healthcare systems struggling to retain staff and fill vacant roles. According to ASHP, 1 in 10 pharmacy administrators surveyed lost 41% or more of their technicians.
Now pharmacists and technicians struggle to keep up with demand while meeting patient expectations, doing their jobs effectively, and keeping patient safety at the forefront. It’s a lot of pressure.
The American Pharmacists Association discovered that an alarming 74% of respondents didn’t think they had enough time to safely perform patient care and clinical duties.
You can help your team stay on top of things by properly testing your pharmacy application and the integration of functions that points to and from the EHR and related systems — technology that runs the gamut from ordering and dispensing, to counting and checking, to will call, phone systems, refills, and more.
By testing the roundtrip transactions generated from your pharmacy department to other departments within the EHR, you gain assurance that they are making their way to the right place.
SureTest can automate this surround system testing and ensure it performs adequately with all clinical applications outside the EHR.
This critically important step will give your team the confidence that its thoroughly tested, reliable, and corresponding with downstream systems.
The Upside of Automation for Pharmacy Teams
With SureTest’s Test Automation Solution, your pharmacy team works more efficiently to speed processing for patients while simultaneously ensuring high patient safety standards. The volume of testing available through automation frees up validation staff to focus on patient safety.
This results in higher accuracy, which helps prevent medication errors and adverse events, as well as higher patient satisfaction, decreased staff burnout, and the ability to keep up with demand.
Free Your Clinical Teams to Focus on Patients
The pandemic has hit clinical teams hard with burnout at an all-time high. According to an Incredible Nurse survey, one-third of nurses plan to leave their jobs in 2022. At the beginning of 2022, an estimated 24% of US hospitals anticipated critical staff shortages within a week.
These shortages have impacted nearly every aspect of healthcare in the clinical setting and threaten to disrupt our healthcare infrastructure. Clinical teams already have an enormous responsibility for delivering patient care but are now expected to also be well-versed in EHR management and other technology.
Test automation for technology outside of the EHR may include software for medical devices, digital technologies for care coordination, chronic disease management, improved patient experience, AR/VR, and remote-monitoring wearables.
The Advantages of Automation for Clinical Teams
By applying SureTest’s Test Automation Solution to any of your clinical IT systems, you can capitalize not only on time and cost savings, but also greatly mitigate staff burnout. Test automation of all types of third-party clinical applications allows you to optimize your full tech stack — not just your EHR — and to test the effective interoperability among them.
With SureTest, your clinical care team can focus on patient care delivery without being disrupted by time-consuming manual testing activities. This results in higher job satisfaction and better employee retention. With greater efficiency, your team can provide a higher level of attention to patients for better outcomes.
Prime Your Revenue Cycle Management Teams to Boost the Bottom Line
Revenue Cycle Management teams often get inundated with manual tasks but only have so many hours in the day. In an MGMA Stat poll, 75% of healthcare leaders ranked staffing as their number one challenge for 2022.
According to HIT Consultant, “79% of RCM areas use outdated technologies in stand-alone applications that are not integrated into the numerous manual processes, resulting in 15% to 20% of claims being denied due to authorization issues or charge capture.”
Here’s the great news: Even if you don’t have enough staff, SureTest’s Test Automation Solution, depending on your EHR, can supercharge your RCM process by automating repetitive tasks. We know your employees would prefer to invest their time doing more valuable work.
Test automation for RCM processes can include RPA (robotic process automation) to rapidly speed up any time-consuming, repetitive manual tasks, triaging tasks, and routing more complex tasks to the appropriately trained specialist. It could also include automating complex workflows for pre-claim, patient encounters, transactions, and A/R follow-up, claims status reporting, and payment posting.
The Profits of Automation for RCM Teams
SureTest’s Test Automation Solution helps address revenue cycle management challenges and provides increased efficiency so you can capture maximum revenue. Human-reliant RCM is time-consuming, prone to error, and costly. By automating RCM processes and workflows, healthcare organizations can minimize human errors such as billing mistakes that result in claim denials or other roadblocks to revenue.
What’s Next
SureTest has a wealth of experience implementing test automation for a wide array of third-party applications for organizations like yours.
Check out our latest case study from client CHRISTUS Health to learn how we helped them complete performance and stress tests for their COVID vaccination portal in under 96 hours.