The SureTest team recently participated in the North Carolina HIMSS Annual Conference and a Minnesota HIMSS Chapter webinar where we reviewed how SureTest’s Test Automation Solution is helping clients radically reform EHR, third-party, and enterprise application testing.
Founder and CEO of SureTest, Laura O’Toole, along with Ryan Neaves, VP of Care Applications at Novant Health, and Nickie Fuhrhop, IT Access & Revenue Cycle Manager at Southern Illinois Healthcare (SIH), discussed how our solution has enabled them to innovate, save, and minimize the impact of staffing shortages.
Under Pressure
Like many healthcare organizations, Novant Health and SIH faced similar challenges. Manual testing is labor-intensive and time-consuming. It siphons valuable time away from primary job roles and is subject to resource limitations and human error.
Health systems typically spend between 8,000 and 20,000 hours annually on manual EHR testing activities. Most health systems rely on build analysts, clinicians, and trainers who have other primary responsibilities – or invest in costly dedicated testing teams.
Before engaging with SureTest, SIH deployed 15 analysts for 2 weeks per quarterly Epic update and spent thousands of hours on manual testing. Beyond quarterly updates, maintaining test scripts and producing result documentation was time consuming for their team.
Novant had a dedicated 12-person testing team and was struggling to keep up with frequent releases as their EHR, third-party, and enterprise application testing became more complex.
Don’t Wanna Miss a Thing
Novant and SIH recognized the critical importance of testing. They recognized that insufficient testing could compromise patient safety, care delivery and compliance and that insufficient testing increases risk and can negatively impact revenue capture, patient access, usability/well-being, and adoption.
I Know There’s An Answer (Hint: It’s An End-to-End Solution)
Novant and SIH knew their IT departments would be unable to keep up with the increased testing demands given current staffing challenges without adding more analysts in the future.
They explored alternatives to manual testing and discovered that SureTest could help their organizations do more with less, do it faster, and do it more effectively. SureTest’s Test Automation Solution would allow their health systems to improve testing quality and remove the heavy burden of manual testing from their teams and use the freed-up resources to handle a backlog of high-priority IT projects and pursue strategic initiatives.
What’s SureTest Got To Do With It?
SureTest’s Test Automation Solution revolutionizes the entire approach to system upgrades and new implementations. Once fully implemented, SureTest eliminates up to 80% or more of manual testing activities.
How It Works
The SureWorks® Library is the key to automation value and jumpstarts the speed of script development. What would take a health system multiple years to develop internally is executed by SureTest in just a few months.
This proprietary resource is constantly updated, and test scripts are drawn from the library and configured to each workflow within your organization’s departments to provide end-to-end integrated and regression testing.
SureTest’s methodology combines SureWorks® with the SurePersona® Engine, 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. Test scripts are automatically deployed and scheduled at scale to drive automatic, system-wide testing.
SureMethod™ is a rigorous framework carefully developed by a team of seasoned healthcare domain specialists in all major EHRs and test automation engineering.
SureTest’s commitment to SureMethod means you realize continual development of scripts, daily testing, and real-time reporting.
Numbers Don’t Lie
Game-Changing Efficiency and Transformational Time/Cost Savings
After implementing SureTest’s Test Automation Solution, SIH eliminated thousands of manual testing hours by having SureTest transform over 375 manual workflows into automated, integrated patient journeys.
Novant Health not only eradicated manual hours but also reduced the cost and time of accepting new releases by eliminating required analyst time and shortening its command center’s duration to 48 hours instead of 1 – 2 weeks.
When fully implemented, by eliminating up to 80% or more of manual testing activities, SureTest’s Test Automation Solution offers tremendous speed to value with leverageable automation in the first 4-6 weeks and full automation (80%) in 6-9 months. Realize a phenomenal positive ROI in Year 1 with a 3-year ROI of up to 200%+.
Employee Morale and Improved Retention
Novant Health was able to disband its 12-person testing team and reassign them to important strategic projects. They are realizing their vision of enterprise test automation while ensuring that appropriate testing is performed numerous times before production.
With manual testing time eliminated, both SIH and Novant Health significantly improved employee morale. Employees are free to focus on strategic tasks for their skill set.
Take On (Testing)
By partnering with SureTest, Novant and SIH were not only able to realize incredible ROI and radically reduce manual testing but also able to drastically improve testing quality, keep up with quarterly upgrades, ensure frequent and sufficient testing, and free its teams to focus on other important responsibilities.
What’s Next
SureTest’s proven approach to intelligent test automation helped Southern Illinois Healthcare leverage automation for their Epic EHR.
Listen to learn more about the challenges SIH faced and how they worked with SureTest and our technology partner, Eggplant, to overcome them.
Listen to the Podcast