4 Reasons Why Quality Assurance in Healthcare is Important

In the healthcare industry, the need of the hour is to make informed decisions at the right moment to save lives. Healthcare organizations must have a “big picture” when dealing with a huge volume of data, which allows them to make quantitative decisions that improve patient care and reduce costs.  

In healthcare technology, any organization needs to have the most robust and comprehensive quality assurance process to make the right decisions to save lives. In a healthcare digital workplace, the right solutions, data, and innovative technology help us mitigate several issues driven by human factors.  

Gartner states, “The best healthcare companies are responding to disruption with digital and innovation initiatives that enable new business models and address the challenges of increasing demand and escalating costs.”  

Healthcare technology has grown by leaps and bounds in recent years. However, it’s not flawless and demands continuous testing as part of the delivery pipeline to ensure the application and data quality.  

Today, a healthcare organization gets data from thousands of providers across multiple systems, and the need for collaboration of all technologies to work together to share a common data platform is tough to achieve.  

With the wide variety of technology and software available, every growing volume of data and industry demand to provide the best 360 care to a patient leads to dropping the guard in quality, a mistake that jeopardizes lives.  

To reduce technical errors and save lives, organizations employ and implement robust quality assurance in healthcare programs, which acts as the final quality gate before patient intervention.   

Quality Assurance is becoming the hallmark of health care. With the need to provide Value-Based Care, pay-for-performance to medical professionals, and the practice of evidence-based medicine, it is becoming increasingly important and an absolute necessity to have quality assurance healthcare work throughout the system to design policies and procedures that promote the best possible patient outcomes.  

Quality Assurance in healthcare typically involves a mixture of data specialists, system integrators, administrators, and process improvement subject matter experts. The need for quality begins with the very first step—bringing everything together to tell a story.  

A good quality assurance program in a healthcare organization can identify potential problem areas and recommend solutions to improve the data they see.  

Quality assurance can bridge the gap between people, processes, and technology, which is the need of the hour. Healthcare workers must have access to the best quality data, results, and outcomes to do their jobs. Compromises in quality will put lives at risk.  

Healthcare is an industry where 30% of clinical laboratory testing is unnecessary or overused. Reports have shown that up to 98,000 deaths per year occur in the United States because of medical data errors, thereby being among the top 10 causes of death.  

Ad-hoc testing recommendations or missing key screenings will result in complications and expenses arising from unwarranted care, which will lead to increased health risks and costs. Quality assurance helps ensure the delivery of the right decision for the right treatment at the right time and in the right setting.  

Quality Assurance in healthcare will ensure the most effective patient treatment, improve clinical outcomes, and optimize cost and affordability.  

What can Quality Assurance (QA) do in healthcare?  

For a QA program to efficiently address all processes and technology in this industry and continuously ensure the quality of these processes, all aspects of Total Quality Management (TQM) must be covered. Let’s talk about what QA can do for a healthcare organization.   

Big Data – Quality Measures  

Gartner states, “Reliable, trustworthy and accessible data is crucial to any healthcare organization’s ongoing ability to successfully orchestrate and pay for care, conduct research and deliver value in the expanding healthcare ecosystem, tackle another COVID-like disruption and extract value from AI investments.”  

With extensive data pouring in every hour for any organization, it is necessary to analyze that data, detect pattern associations, and provide intervention for the most relevant patient care.  

A QA program can control these processes, algorithms, methods, and business intelligence to guarantee that healthcare workers are being provided with the best quality measures so that they can make informed decisions.  

Security  

Multiple software programs integrate to share patient data on various networks. Security is often compromised when data is shared across hundreds of providers who may not have the required compliance you have in your infrastructure.  

Strict government and regulatory body rules and rising healthcare demands necessitate a sharp focus on software and data security. A QA program will ensure the software and its data are secured from end to end without compromising any protocols the regulatory body sets.  

Integration Testing 

Healthcare applications extract and feedback updated data to various forms and modules of different applications in multiple departments within the same organization. Integration testing must be performed to ensure that the overall healthcare web application and dependent devices are integrated and working as per the requirements.  

Functional Testing  

For healthcare software products and applications integration, it is important to ensure that the applications are functionally mature enough to deliver the required performance and service. Consider a hospital application that helps patients customize care reports. The application must be functional and always have all the data updated to deliver the required service accurately.   

Functional testing of these integrated applications helps validate processes and workflows. Performance measures are taken every step of the way to ensure the desired results are true value and  100% accurate. This is done by measuring the output, implementation, and execution of every defined parameter.  

Consequently, functional testing helps ensure the highest quality output within shorter development cycles. Quality Assurance programs in healthcare further ensure comprehensive coverage across all scenarios and setups, which helps achieve end-to-end testing.  

A comprehensive and scalable QA program is regarded as a must for every healthcare organization to grow. The QA implementation strategy begins with the establishment of the right culture and mindset to look for quality in every deliverable.  

Conclusion  

Cigniti Technologies has been providing healthcare QA services to providers for a few decades. Our testing services touch upon the following segments, which we can further customize to your needs in delivering robust and secure online healthcare solutions.  

Our software testing solutions are for diverse life science and healthcare players such as hospitals, pharmaceutical companies, healthcare services, clinical labs, diagnostic centers, third-party administrators (TPA), payers, medical equipment manufacturers, healthcare ISVs, and research organizations.  

We provide end-to-end Advisory & Transformation services, Test Automation, and Performance, Functional, & Security Testing solutions with a strong emphasis on regulations, compliance, quality, and more.