6 Reasons Why Quality Assurance& Testing in Healthcare is Important

Speed and quality are the core essentials for serving the healthcare sector effectively. The industry’s challenges and undying demands have led to significant inventions and enhancements. Digitization is one of the breakthroughs that healthcare has witnessed. It implies connecting people and devices and deriving meaningful inferences from the data generated to offer better services. This establishes that digitization can transform the sector and enable healthcare to provide better services. 

However, various questions surround digitization in healthcare—the benefits of digital ecosystems for CIOs, the need for advanced analytics to drive significant changes, the investments required for taking the digital leap, and the expected performance of applications. Quality Assurance and Testing enable enterprises to answer these questions and implement better digital strategies for the sector. The importance of quality assurance in healthcare cannot be overstated. It ensures that patients receive the highest standard of care by systematically monitoring and improving healthcare processes. 

Technology is the most significant transformation point in the healthcare sector, wherein applications are being created to deliver service anytime, anywhere, and connected medical devices are helping experts provide their services even from a distance. There are a growing number of healthcare products, such as wearables, and a number of applications associated with them. These products have a big market and have a tremendous impact on the economy. Consequently, healthcare products need to deliver accuracy and precision, which is possible with robust testing and quality assurance. 

Moreover, home healthcare is changing the way healthcare functions, requiring easy and quick access. On-demand medical assistance is the new paradigm in the healthcare segment. Home healthcare is a rising trend and is expected to grow in the coming years. 

There are some evident reasons for comprehensive testing in the healthcare sector. Let’s look at a few. 

1. Interoperability of medical devices

Healthcare involves medical devices and applications that need to interoperate and connect to deliver the required experience to the user. The sector has a huge demand for interoperability, regulatory compliance, security, and data privacy. There is a need for healthcare application testing that involves technology expertise, major time and resources, and costs. This must be done diligently, as it determines business sustainability and requires compliance issues. 

This requires rigorous testing and a thought-through quality assurance plan. These tests need to be recorded and repeated for audit and compliance purposes. Test automation is implemented to create a robust QA environment and ensure that every aspect of the product/application is tested to ensure interoperability. For instance, healthcare wearables interact with users via mobile applications. If both the wearable and the application do not sync, they might not show accurate results. With the innovation around IoT and smart devices, there is a need for medical devices, software control, and applications to integrate with the core software. 

2. Functional Validation of the Software

Across healthcare products and applications, it is important to ensure that the software is fit enough to deliver the required performance and service. For instance, consider a hospital application that helps patients to generate reports with a secure login. The application must always be functional to deliver the required service accurately. 

Software testing in healthcare helps to validate business workflows and take performance measures to ensure the desired results. This is done by monitoring the strategy, implementation, and execution of every defined parameter. Consequently, this helps provide the highest quality output within shorter development cycles. Quality assurance further ensures comprehensive coverage across all the scenarios and setups, allowing complete testing. 

3. Security of the Applications

Healthcare applications contain sensitive data about patients and their health-related information. If the applications are hacked, this can lead to a major breach. Security Testing with Penetration Testing helps make applications hack-proof and sustainable in the challenging digital scenario. Some key measures are validating and authenticating user log-ins, testing against firewalls, and encrypting user data. Quality Assurance and testing are essential to ensure the security of these applications. 

Healthcare applications or products must adhere to the stringent Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) requirements that protect Patient Health Information. With effective QA in healthcare, all the information flow across channels can be eased out and kept secure. 

4. Big Data Testing in Healthcare

Healthcare is a highly data-intensive sector with tons of patient information and health conditions. This data is essential for healthcare institutions and associated segments to devise the right strategy and build relevant products. Big Data solutions are implemented to derive the right inferences and data points. It helps make informed decisions regarding drug inventions, disease cures, research and development, and much more for the healthcare sector. 

Big Data solutions need to be implemented effectively within the organization’s ecosystem. This requires Big Data testing for flawless implementation, which leads to expected outcomes. 

5. Usability Testing in Healthcare

Usability Testing is critical in the Healthcare sector. For instance, pharmacists and nurses encounter various features and user scenarios innumerable times during working hours. These tasks can be eased out with automation and adding features that simplify the tedious process. The User Interface and User Experience of healthcare-related apps and medical devices can also be enhanced with much-needed Usability Testing methods. 

6. Effective Implementation and Productivity

Healthcare systems need to ensure increased efficiency and productivity to serve the patients in a better way. Applications are becoming complex, and ensuring that they function effectively without any interruptions or interventions is essential. Quality Assurance ensures that all the application nodes work seamlessly to provide a holistic experience to the users. This ensures productivity and sustainable growth for the players in the healthcare segment. 

In Conclusion 

The healthcare sector has to deal with the security of patient data, a secure interface for applications, good turnaround time, interoperability of medical devices, and flawless performance on a daily basis.  

Quality Assurance and Testing help healthcare organizations to deliver relevant solutions to patients or consumers. Lifestyle healthcare technology products are a big market. A recent report by MarketsandMarkets estimates that the Wireless Health Market will be worth $110.12 Billion by 2020. 

To gain the required market share, product companies need to become more market-ready and build applications with enhanced features to lure consumers. 

At Cigniti, we help transform innovative designs into reliable and successful products with our independent verification & validation (V&V) practices for Medical Device Testing. Our V&V services include an end-to-end test life cycle offering involving processes, people, and tools. Our experts test a gamut of healthcare applications, tools, and medical devices in the healthcare sector. 

Connect with us to build trending, user-friendly products and applications that will not only bring profitability to your organization but also extend better services to users.