Describe the changes in the healthcare testing landscape over the years

Healthcare Testing

Technology transforms at the blink of an eye in this fast-paced world. Innovations have altered nearly every sector - from manufacturing to education, with the healthcare sector being no exception. In fact, this sector has experienced a seismic shift due to the advent of digital technologies. Even though medical practitioners have utilized technology for years, recent innovations have been helpful in increasing patient access to healthcare and empowering everyone to actively take care of their health. Today, healthcare recommendations that were only available in clinics and doctor's chambers can be accessed via digital devices.

Digital transformation has changed the infrastructure, representative models and delivery mechanism of the healthcare sector. A recent study by marketsandmarkets has estimated the digital healthcare sector to reach around USD 280 billion by the end of 2021. Of late, the healthcare industry has become a data-driven one, facilitating patient-centered care while focusing on minimizing the cost of treatment. With the landscape of healthcare services aiming at easing the delivery of quality healthcare solutions to the patients, the industry is increasingly looking at healthcare application testing. In the past decade or so, the healthcare testing landscape has undergone myriad changes to enhance scale, performance, and quality. 

In fact, one of the most important changes in this direction has been the implementation of DevOps in healthcare application testing. DevOps aims at enhancing the capabilities of developers/testers and reducing the SDLC through seamless processes. Today’s healthcare QA testing allows the rapid delivery of outcomes, fixes and updates while speeding up the time to market. This is especially crucial for the healthcare app service providers who need to stay competitive by improving the quality of products at a faster rate than their peers using traditional testing methodologies. Also, the rigorous requirements set forth by regulatory agencies like GDPR, GxP, or HIPAA have created a distinctive shift in the healthcare testing landscape that DevOps is positioned to transform.
Here is a list of recent healthcare testing services and strategies that the healthcare app providers are utilizing:

DevOps leading to enhanced efficiency:

DevOps has helped the healthcare industry to streamline and automate the SDLC and infrastructure management procedure. This methodology of software testing has eliminated the operational silos and has enhanced the collaboration among teams – development, testing and operations. It has optimized the scale of operations and productivity of the above-mentioned teams. Now, thanks to DevOps, healthcare services can carry out frequent updates and innovations at a faster pace by minimizing risks associated with traditional development cycles. The Continuous Integration/Continuous Deployment (CI/CD) aspect of DevOps gets manifested in the microservice option, blue/green deployments, pipelines, and other service delivery options. Also, with the help of DevOps-driven health care app testing, the teams can deploy the updates faster.

With DevOps, the software applications can be built by using the microservice architecture to decouple a complex and large system into small independent segments. This methodology is advantageous to market any new drug, close the gaps in patient care or to gain a competitive advantage in the healthcare industry.

Data-driven methodology to offer accurate and quality patient care:

Although extracting meaningful insights from accurate healthcare data is challenging and complex, this helps to deliver quality patient care. As clinical data continue to proliferate at an exponential rate, the healthcare application testing providers have taken recourse to DevOps to expedite big data projects. With the presence of several data sources ranging from lab reports, electronic health reports, and insurance claims to medical devices, the need for structured data has become indispensable. 

To offer improved patient care services, the healthcare service providers need to structure, analyze and update the data. DevOps helps to automate the process of data recording and analysis, which were previously considered to be manual and tedious. With the implementation of big data tools and combining the development and operations processes, DevOps has enhanced the operational efficiencies and transformed the way data-driven applications are crafted.

Leveraging DevOps methodology to explore big data in the healthcare processes can help organizations to minimize the treatment costs, prevent communicable diseases, and forecast any outbreak of epidemics.

Usability testing of healthcare devices:

Usability testing plays a key role in the healthcare industry. It can help a software application to be validated by scores of users (real and virtual) across digital touchpoints. There can be plenty of scenarios where medical professionals face challenges while operating state-of-the-art medical devices. These may happen due to malfunctioning of the embedded software associated with that device. This, however, can be avoided with the help of test automation, which can simplify the entire process of testing the quality of software.

Regulatory compliance and security of data

DevOps has played a crucial role in the emergence of cloud-based healthcare applications. However, the looming threat of data breaches remains constant. The rise of fitness and healthcare related software also points to the challenge of monitoring the IoT devices. The proliferation of different healthcare apps, IoT gadgets, and other connected devices is creating challenges related to reliability, sanctity, and security of data. This is because they do not provide any endpoint security agent to prevent any malicious attack. However, such a scenario can be prevented with the implementation of DevSecOps. For DevSecOps builds security into the app development process and provides end-to-end cybersecurity solutions for healthcare applications. This enhances the security of healthcare applications and incentivizes developers and testers to collaborate across the SDLC.

Conclusion

By combining the development and operations teams in the DevOps model, healthcare QA testing can generate improved efficiencies, quality outcomes, and faster time to market. With the healthcare sector poised to grow even bigger with the advent of IoT, big data, cloud, and AI, the healthcare testing landscape needs to incorporate advanced methodologies and technologies to deliver quality outcomes.

Diya works for Cigniti Technologies, Global Leaders in Independent Quality Engineering & Software Testing Services to be appraised at CMMI-SVC v1.3, Maturity Level 5, and is also ISO 9001:2015 & ISO 27001:2013 certified. 




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