I’ve spent many years building teams that deliver specialized services — project augmentation, strategic advisory solutions, and EHR selection and implementations — to healthcare organizations across the country.
In 2019 , while at Santa Rosa Consulting, my team and I launched a successful test automation offering eagerly adopted by our clients. The feedback we received confirmed what we had known all along: the healthcare industry was in dire need of a powerful alternative to manual testing.
Manual testing is complex, tedious, and cumbersome. It demands the attention of IT analysts, superusers and clinicians who need to work on more mission-critical activities, whose time would be better spent on patient care.
When the pandemic hit, we watched our clients be impacted financially. We saw them emotionally consumed beyond anything we had experienced in all our time with them. With the remote work capability healthcare has embraced since Covid, and the high burnout rate recorded among front-line healthcare workers, we are also seeing many clients struggle against a war for talent. For nursing staff alone, permanent nurse vacancies at hospitals and health systems are 20% higher than before the pandemic.
We knew we needed to focus our energies on immediate support and deliver solutions that would save them money, precious time, and perhaps most important, allow their teams to work on things they’re not only good at, but that they love doing. A team that works to their strengths is 38% more likely to be productive, and 50% more likely not to leave. We were inspired by a new vision: to transform EHR, third-party, and enterprise application testing so healthcare professionals are free to focus on caring for their communities. Out of that vision, SureTest was born.
How SureTest Has Transformed Testing
SureTest is intelligent healthcare IT automation that empowers health systems to transform their entire EHR, third-party, and enterprise application testing processes.
We make the complex simple and enable health systems to do more with less by removing the time, expense, and pain of testing to instantly improve the speed and integrity of operations. This helps healthcare systems to reclaim thousands of hours every year. Our test automation offering is comprised of three critical components:
- The SureWorks® library is an extensive collection of automated test scripts that accelerates the speed of customized development.
- The SurePersona® engine configures to your unique structure and emulates the exact functions each team member needs to employ for each use case.
- The SureMethod® framework is the foundation for each test automation sequence we deploy and provides continuous testing, robust script maintenance, and real-time reporting.
Novant Health: A Case Study in Staggering Savings
Novant Health, an integrated health network, partnered with SureTest to automate testing for its Epic system. The organization’s ten-person quality assurance team responsible for manual testing needed to improve testing scope and reduce costs.
SureTest identified and implemented ten critical patient journeys for each of Novant’s current Epic modules, this included about 60% of their individual end-user workflows covering their most frequent and impactful testing scenarios. After initial workflow capture, managed an Epic full version upgrade. This included a major user interface design change which presented a significant “look and feel” gap between the recorded workflows and the live EHR system.
Our deep Epic expertise enabled Novant to incorporate the changes and close the gap, and we helped the organization continue maintaining automated scripts, matching workflows and changes within the EHR.
By partnering with SureTest, Novant significantly improved the efficiency and integrity of its testing process. The time to run test scripts decreased by an average of 91% and labor to run test scripts decreased by 100%.
Southern Illinois Healthcare: Epic Updates
Another example of SureTest’s ability to bring value to clients is through our partnership with Southern Illinois Healthcare (SIH), where we provide test automation as a managed service for its Epic EHR system.
Within nine months of project kick-off, SureTest automated regularly executed test case scenarios. SIH then leveraged automation for the first quarterly Epic update received during the script development phase and now receives continuous smoke and regression testing of key clinical and revenue cycle workflows that populate downstream systems.
SureTest serves as SIH’s turnkey partner for quarterly Epic updates and provides daily maintenance on automation to keep system changes current. The partnership has resulted in the elimination of thousands of manual testing hours, which has greatly improved employee morale.
The staff is now free to focus on their specialized skill sets. Over 375 manual workflows have transformed into automated integrated patient journeys, and the results dashboard now contains real-time logs and audit trails.
Innovating into the Future
For far too long, the healthcare industry has been burdened by outdated processes that slow down advancements in patient care. At SureTest, we know we can do better. Innovation has been a part of our DNA since the beginning. We remain dedicated to reinventing the status quo and pioneering new possibilities for the healthcare industry.
SureTest’s vision for the future includes expanding outside of EHR test automation into robotic process automation (RPA) for third-party systems. We look forward to helping healthcare organizations turn the page with expanded automation, RPA, and next-box solutions.
What’s Next
We hope to see you at the CHIME21 Fall Forum in San Diego, October 27-30. In the meantime, join us on Thursday, October 21 at 1:00 p.m. ET for our webinar: “Unpacking Test Automation: How to Innovate and Save Like Novant Health.”
We’ll speak with Ryan Neaves, VP of Care Operations at Novant Health, about how test automation helped the organization innovate while saving time and money.