In the latest episode of This Week In Health Tech, Vik and Jimmy continue the series on Test Automation in the healthcare space, focusing on EMR and Health Systems Test Automation.
Here is what they discussed:
- “What is so different about testing in EMRs as opposed to web based applications?”
- Web based applications may or may not deal with patient data. However, EMRs and other hospital systems all have patient health information (PHI). Vik states that because patient data is involved, the impact of an EMR error or hospital system (PACS, Ambulatory, Laboratory, etc.) error is much higher as it could lead to critical adverse effects for patients.
- “How are things typically done now in regards to testing?”
- Changes are continuously being made to health systems, based on feedback from clinical staff for different workflows. When these changes are implemented, testing needs to be done in order to ensure bugs have not occurred. Vik explains in details the traditional approach for testing changes in a healthcare organization, which still relies heavily on manual testing and cross-department collaboration.
- “If testing is so important, why do organizations place it on the back burner?”
- Jimmy asks Vik why emphasis on testing is so low. The traditional manual testing approach involves feedback from hospital staff. Vik talks on how it is not the staff’s (Doctors, Nurses, etc.) top priority to test every aspect of a system, since they are dealing with their own job deadlines. Vik details how much time is needed to manually test properly and the staggering cost involved with such a process.
- “What can be done better in the industry in terms of testing?”
- Vik states that an organization cannot simply rely on manual testing. Using technology to automate testing will save an organization time and costs. Initially, once an assessment is done to capture all the different workflows and downstream systems used, the team can then develops test scripts. They also use integration framework since all the information to downstream systems going through the interfaces can be used to cross check information between EMR and downstream systems.
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