Manual effort is always fraught with the possibility of error. Despite rigorous procedures and guidelines, a task handled manually (from the Latin manus, by hand) is vulnerable to mistakes. Just as clinical teams rely on a range of automation technologies to perform their lifesaving work, IT departments that wrestle with the manual testing of EHR, third-party, and enterprise applications are beginning to acknowledge the need for automation as well—to save them time, effort, and energy—but most importantly, to improve accuracy and minimize human error.
Attention and Perfection Suffer with Manual Testing
IT system testing is a draining, all-consuming task that demands attention and perfection. But performance and accuracy suffer as manual testing processes drag on. According to the error rate table of reliability and safety engineering expert David Smith, “a human fails 5% of his or her attempts at entering ten digits into a field and reads information incorrectly one percent of the time.” Human beings are not robots. Mistakes are inevitable and lead to issues that require time and effort to sort out, causing frustration and a loss of time. This stressful situation is especially true when teams are short-staffed and need everyone to work harder to compensate for lost head count.
What Keeps Analysts Up at Night?
Before car manufacturers automated much of their assembly lines, consumers were warned never to buy a car made on a Friday because workers were worn out from the monotony of repetitive tasks, and the finished product would likely have flaws.
The same holds true for manual testing. One small mistake in manual testing can lead to risk, causing significant consequences—including compromising patient safety. Manual testing can increase the risk of testing errors, as testing quality drops every hour that goes by. Nine hours of testing EHR scripts is not healthy for anybody. As one SureTest client said, “it all starts to look the same.”
In addition, some analysts are more skilled and comfortable with testing than others. This affects testing quality and leads to variation rather than consistency. Having confidence that testing is consistent is critical for patient care.
The Antidote for What Ails (Your Team)
Testing automation removes the potential for human error. Using scripted sequences, an automation tool can validate whether the software functions correctly and with greatly improved accuracy. Your team doesn’t have to go through the painstaking process of manual testing, and your organization doesn’t need to be susceptible to risks that could negatively impact outcomes.
With test automation, you gain peace of mind that your EHR, third-party, and enterprise applications are set up and tested correctly. Since automated testing is faster and easier, you can do it more often, which means you can continuously test. This is essential as scripts evolve and any small change impacts results.
How SureTest Helps You Revolutionize Your Testing
When it comes to finding the right test automation solution for your organization, consider healthcare’s unique challenges and requirements. Unlike standard test automation tools, SureTest was created specifically for healthcare and leverages the shared components of patient journeys to configure your SurePersona® Engine. This robust tool emulates the exact functions each team member needs to employ for each use case, accounting for every patient journey and workflow and performing them with astounding speed and precision every time.
SureWorks®, our constantly updated test script library, contains over 2,500 workflows typically found across EHRs, third-party, and enterprise applications. This library lets healthcare organizations jumpstart the speed of custom development so it’s specific to individualized workflows. You can test faster, test better, and test continuously.
With SureTest, you can eliminate up to 80% or more of manual testing activities to free your team and substantially reduce human error.
Moreover, our fully managed service test automation solution includes a dedicated test automation engineer who ensures your test scripts are always updated with even the slightest changes.
Automated Testing Is the Right Remedy for Human Error
“Mistakes are a fact of life. It is the response to error that counts,” according to Nikki Giovanni, one of America’s greatest living poets. For health IT professionals toiling away at manual system testing, the right response to addressing errors starts with acknowledging the inevitability of human error and embracing automation as the ideal alternative to improve accuracy.
Clients across the country have realized the value—in accuracy as well as cost savings and employee satisfaction—of transforming their testing approach with SureTest’s test automation solution. But before you take your journey toward test automation, we bet you have questions-lots of them. We have answers.
Explore our detailed list of Frequently Asked Questions to find out more