Creating a high-quality product is essential, no matter your industry and customer type. However, healthcare software testing is especially crucial, as literal lives depend on its quality. These days, solutions for the medical industry help diagnose and treat patients all over the world. So, an error may result in a misdiagnosis or a doctor assigning the wrong treatment.
JetBase has talked about developing telemedicine apps before, but today, we want to spotlight one particular stage of development. This thorough look at healthcare application testing will show the importance of testing, as well as offer insights into how to do it right. We will talk about the types of testing, key challenges in quality assurance, and the possible risks during testing.
As usual, the article is based on JetBase’s decade of experience in the market. We’ll specifically rely on our experience in healthcare, from web apps to mobile solutions. Our end goal is to prove just how indispensable proper testing is for healthcare software. Without further ado, let’s begin this deep dive into testing healthcare applications.
Why Should You Implement Quality Assurance In Medicine?
Let’s start with the cold, hard facts: you need QA because a faulty app, especially one flawed in terms of security, might lead to millions in losses. It’s more than possible for a data breach to damage a company’s reputation indefinitely or even shut it down entirely. If you’re wondering how relevant this risk is for the healthcare industry—just look at Flo.
Mismanagement of user data is a huge risk for any company, but that’s not the only reason why QA matters. Statistics show that a majority of apps lose up to 90% of daily active users within just a month of installation. It may seem like users are simply being picky, thanks to plentiful options available on the market. But that’s just one possible explanation.
The other reason is that users spend that initial month getting to know the app. And if the dev team skipped proper diligence of testing, every day will expose users to new bugs. They don’t have to be critical, app-breaking stuff, either. One minor glitch or unoptimized load time is a problem, but ten or twenty of them? They can put a user off your product for good.
It’s also important to consider that timely healthcare domain testing is more cost-effective. Research has proven that fixing errors as early as possible ends up avoiding extra expenses and just generally costing less. Besides, preventing flaws in your app will not only affect your bottom line but encourage more patients and medical institutions to adopt your software.
One last point, which is almost unique to the healthcare industry, is regulatory compliance. A risk remains even if you follow the legal requirements fully and consult lawyers extensively. Bugs that affect your app’s security or patient data can jeopardize your business. It doesn’t matter much whether you break HIPAA regulations intentionally or due to a lack of testing, so let’s not give authorities any reasons to scrutinize you.
Understanding User Expectations in Healthcare Software
One of the core goals of testing healthcare software is to deliver a better product to your users. But what counts toward the overall quality level, and how can you meet your audience’s expectations? Through our healthcare projects, JetBase has learned what the market expects from healthcare solutions, and we are happy to share the knowledge.
Reliability
First and foremost, users dealing with medical issues and using software for them will want stability. They need to know your app will not show an error after they fill out a long form addressing their complaints or crash during a doctor’s call. Testing helps address this head-on, as you can focus on making your solution load-resistant and refined to the maximum possible level.
Compatibility
You want to reach all kinds of users. That means making your solution compatible with several generations of tech, as well as less popular devices. We don’t just mean IoT tech and hospital equipment (though we’ll cover them later). Your software needs to run equally smoothly on the newest iPhone and an older Android phone that might have just a fraction of processing power.
Privacy
This is one of the most common associations for healthcare solutions. With regulations like HIPAA, you know that patients’ data has to be insulated from any unwanted access. That puts a spotlight on security testing and discourages things like targeted advertising. Health matters are a sensitive thing and giving users a sense of real privacy is important.
UI/UX
The ultimate goal should be a simple, straightforward UI that keeps the user experience simple and efficient. Users need easy access to their accounts and information and the ability to navigate the app’s features with just a few taps. If your solution is patient-facing, remember to account for elderly users and those with vision impairments.
Categories of Healthcare Software That Require Rigorous Testing
Healthcare solutions can be quite varied, both in terms of functionality and the target audience. However, pretty much every type needs thorough quality assurance. In this section, we will cover these types and their differences. As a result, you should understand the special approach that you’ll need to take for each of them.
Direct Interaction or Telemedicine
This type of software facilitates connections between patients and healthcare professionals. It can be done via video calls, live chats, or even usual messaging. Solutions like this are best for consultations, check-ups, and even diagnoses. Here, it’s crucial to ensure stability so that communication doesn’t get interrupted and patients can receive timely healthcare even with a bad connection or on an old device.
Another aspect of direct interaction software is that it needs multi-tenant access and secure data storage. Doctors must be able to see and work with patients’ information, but only on a case-by-case basis. Simply put, your software has to allow access to the data only when a specific doctor is assigned to a patient’s case.
Remote Patient Monitoring
Monitoring software helps doctors keep tabs on patients with long-term or even chronic illnesses. These solutions gather, store, and process tons of sensitive health data, requiring very tight security. Moreover, load testing is absolutely paramount for this type of software, as it may need to support thousands of patients, each with a distinct data stream.
It’s also important to focus on compatibility, as monitoring software works best when it’s connected to IoT devices. The latter collect the relevant health data, so keeping a steady connection between your product and the medical equipment is key. Plus, when testing healthcare software of this type, pay special attention to UX. It needs to fit a vast pool of users, including ones for whom this may be a rare tech-related experience.
Hospital Management
It’s perhaps the most complex type of medical software, as management systems need to account for many variables. Things like scheduling shifts, tracking inventory, compiling reports, and monitoring patients can all fall under the umbrella of “management” software. As a result, these solutions usually take extra time and finesse if you want proper healthcare application testing.
As with remote monitoring software, management solutions rely on being part of the hospital’s internal system. Testing its integration in the network and interoperability should be among the priorities. This aspect also has to be tailored for individual systems, meaning even slight changes for a new client will require you to do brand new rounds of testing.
Health Tracking
You can consider this type the little brother of monitoring software, as it also needs to collect and analyze health data. But it’s usually simpler because only the user sees and interacts with that data. Plus, it’s often directed at only one particular purpose, such as period tracking, calorie counting, or sleep monitoring. As a result, it’s easier to test, though it also requires stable interoperability.
Overview of Common Testing Types in Healthcare Software
The best way to ensure your healthcare software testing is thorough would be to try multiple approaches. Each different type of testing covers more potential issues and weeds them out. We’ll list a few key types for your team to consider.
Load Testing
This technique is intended to verify your system’s load resistance and make sure it won’t buckle under pressure. Initial testing of this type is commonly known as smoke testing - applying a bit of pressure, below potential peak levels, to see how well the MVP runs. If that part of QA goes well, you move on to later stages of development and go from smoke to the proverbial fire.
Full-scale load testing happens once you’re closer to launch. The typical approach is to simulate the peak processing power and, just in case, you can go over that expected limit. With this testing, you’re making sure that your software will withstand processing tons of data and simultaneous user interactions. This is particularly crucial for hospital management software, which keeps huge medical institutions running.
Data Security Testing
We’ve already mentioned that security is paramount for healthcare solutions, so verifying your software’s protective measures is high on the list of priorities. Your team can do penetration tests to probe different attack vectors that a real attacker would use. This lets you preventively patch potential security gaps before they become full-blown risks for your company.
It’s important to note that this type of healthcare application testing requires a particular specialization. You should ideally outsource this to a company that’s focused on security testing, as a regular QA team might not be able to cover all bases here.
Compatibility Testing
Healthcare apps bring the most value when they’re integrated into a medical institution's network. It gives them the ability to collect and analyze more data, sync it across different branches and doctors, and handle tasks like scheduling and monitoring. However, integrations with third-party ecosystems aren’t always smooth. This makes compatibility testing essential for health software.
Your QA team should verify that your solution can run on a broad variety of devices and operating systems while testing its connection to third-party APIs and databases. A single point of failure can disrupt the operation of the whole network, so it’s up to your team to spot the tiniest possible issues.
Integration Testing
Unlike compatibility testing, integration is all about the internal cohesiveness of your software. You’ll be making sure that each module and building block of your app is communicating correctly with others. It’s important to zoom in and look at the micro level, verifying each little piece’s integrity. However, you also should be looking at the bigger picture and vetting your system as a whole.
Usability Testing
If you’re making a patient-doctor communication app, it’s absolutely crucial that you test your UI/UX thoroughly. You need to account for all kinds of users, including the elderly and those with visual impairments. That’s why it makes sense to do this healthcare software testing both during the initial design stage to get early feedback and during the actual development.
The second round will allow your users to see how the app changed from the initial ideas and see it work in practice. It’s entirely possible that initial mockups might have positive feedback but verifying usability is more important. This determines how easy your app is to use and, thus, to adopt as a permanent solution. It helps boost your software’s popularity, as well as provide a more stable experience to your users.
Regression Testing
You’ll hopefully be making plenty of positive changes to your software with all the quality assurance you’re doing. However, each change causes a ripple effect, often in very unpredictable ways. That’s why it’s important to continuously run regression testing. It will help verify that the problems you dealt with earlier haven’t popped up again and that new updates or fixes do not introduce new problems elsewhere.
There are more ways of testing healthcare software, but covering them would take a while. These key types should give you a strong head start and boost the quality of your software. But if you’d like a bit more information, feel free to get in touch with JetBase for a quick consultation.
Key Challenges in Testing Healthcare Applications
Generally speaking, your healthcare application testing should go smoothly, especially if you’re working with an experienced dev team. However, there are certain challenges that pop up. It’s easier to surmount them when you’re well-informed, so we’ll cover the core ones here.
Testing for All Users
It’s harder to anticipate the route to the best UX when you target a category as broad as “patients” and “medical staff.” Market research helps, of course, but you will still need your team to be on their best game for healthcare software testing. You need to account for a very wide target audience, both the tech-savvy crowd that uses telehealth for convenience and older people who may struggle with it.
Similarly, you need to account for very different use cases. Some people need medical software for occasional check-ins, while others require regular monitoring or frequent contact with the doctor. It’s important to cover all bases and deliver a product that’s more than just usable—for anyone needing it.
Interoperability with IoT and Medical Equipment
In an ideal world, you’d be testing your software in tandem with a variety of devices that it will have to connect to. Be it for purposes of monitoring and data sync or analyzing patient information, your application benefits from interoperability. However, it’s pretty much impossible to get access to the unique medical equipment that you need.
For the best results, your team will have to create virtual environments that mirror the required devices. Then, you’ll be able to verify that your app can integrate itself with any network of equipment. It’s important to test with both modern and slightly older equipment to ensure compatibility and guarantee that the devices can handle the load.
Complexity of Solutions
Healthcare software performs a sprawling array of functions, such as keeping doctors and patients connected, analyzing scans, and optimizing hospital processes. While the type of your software will determine how complex it is, there is still a baseline level of difficulty when testing medical solutions.
The number of moving parts in these products means you will need to diversify your resting methods substantially. Regressive testing also requires special attention, as your changes will inevitably cause a domino effect in the code.
Risks During Healthcare Software Testing and Their Consequences
We’ve outlined the challenges that most companies face when conducting healthcare software testing, but we also want to discuss the risks. They are similar to challenges but carry a bit more weight.
Lack of Security Know-How
QA specialists cover all areas of software, including potential security faults. However, we’ve stressed before that security in healthcare software is especially vital. You’re dealing with an industry that almost exclusively handles personal data and has copious regulations for it. This puts a special emphasis on security and requires a level of expertise that general QA teams might not have.
It might make sense to specifically outsource security-related testing if you want to guarantee impeccable results. Of course, you’ll need an NDA, but working with a highly skilled team minimizes all risks. Not committing to strong security can leave you facing fines and the ire of regulatory committees.
Iteration Failure and Regression Issues
These two risks go hand in hand, as not having backups of your software’s iterations puts pressure on the coders. It’s easy to see the value of backups if regression testing uncovers major issues caused by the latest round of changes. Access to multiple versions that can be used to better understand the software and iterate upon it is essential for complex healthcare solutions.
Strategies for Improving Code Quality in Healthcare Solutions
There are two core things you need to create better software: focus and experience. The latter is fairly straightforward - nobody makes masterful code on their first try. Staff your dev department with those who have worked in the healthcare industry before and you’ll end up with better results.
The former, though, is a matter of external and internal management. Your project manager has to be vigilant and responsive to the dev team’s needs and challenges. Meanwhile, the developers themselves have to approach the project with care and without rushing. Focusing on each feature and thoroughly testing it may not be the most exciting approach, but it’s one that brings results.
As with any other task, healthcare software testing goes better when true professionals handle it. In fact, the ideal approach is to delegate both development and testing, letting one unified team deliver a refined product. This is why JetBase should be on your radar as a seasoned vendor of healthcare solutions.
JetBase has spent a decade crafting custom software that’s known for its quality and reliability. If you want your healthcare project to receive the attention and care it deserves, reach out to us. We can schedule a consultation and offer our development and testing services to improve your software’s quality.
