Healthcare Domain Testing is a process to test healthcare application for various factors like standards, safety, compliance, cross dependency with other entities, etc. The purpose of healthcare domain testing is to ensure quality, reliability, performance, safety and efficiency of the Healthcare application.
Basic knowledge of Health Care Domain
The entire health care system is weaved with each other by the single body that is hospital or provider (doctor).
While the other entities include-
- Insurance company: Medicare, Medicaid, BCBS, etc.
- Patient/Consumers: Patient Enrolled
- Regulatory Authority: HIPAA, OASIS assessment, HCFA 1500 and UB92, etc.
- Health-care and Life-Science solution Vendors
Basic Terminology of Health Care System
- Provider: A health care professional (doctor), medical group, clinic, lab, hospital, etc. licensed by health care services
- Claim: A request to your health insurance company to pay a bill for health care service
- Broker: An insurance professional, who negotiates, procures insurance on behalf of insured or prospective insured
- Finance: Insurance bodies that pay for medical expenses, it could be government (Medicare or Medicaid) or commercial (BCBS)
- Medicare: A federal health insurance program for senior citizen and permanently disabled people
- Medicaid: A joint and state program that helps low-income families and individuals pay for the cost associated with medical care
- CPT code: A current procedural terminology code is a medical code set to describe medical, surgical and diagnostic services
- HIPAA: It is a set of rules and regulations which doctors, hospitals, healthcare providers and health plan must follow in order to provide their services
Healthcare Business Process
Most health-care organization have adapted software program to process the smooth functioning of the system. This software system gives all the information in a single document for each entity dealing with this.
Interconnecting this whole system to a single web application is a huge task and making it work effectively is even a bigger task. Rigorous testing of this health application is compulsory, and it has to go through various testing phases.
In this tutorial, we will learn,
Testing of Providers system
Performance testing of Healthcare Application
Before preparing test scenarios certain requirement of the system should be considered. For example, health-care providers (Doctors/Hospitals) provide care 24/7, so the patient check-in software needs to be available at all times. Also, it needs to communicate with insurance companies to validate policy information, send claims and receive remittances. Here, the architecture should define the different components of the system, the protocol to communicate with insurance companies, and how to deploy the system so that it complies 24/7.
As a tester, you need to ensure that the healthcare software system meets the desired load/performance benchmark.
Other Testing Types for Healthcare Application
- Functional Testing: Testing healthcare application against functional capabilities
- Conformance Testing: Conformance test Healthcare security requisites and industry frameworks
- Platform Testing: Testing of applications on Mobile platform and applications testing for cross-browser compatibility
- Interoperability Testing: Testing conformance to interoperability standards ( Eg; DICOM, HL7, CCD/CDA)
Testing Challenges in Healthcare Application
Testing challenges in testing healthcare application are no different than other web application testing.
- Requires expertise in testing, and usually, it is high in cost
- Requires interoperability, compliance, regulatory, security, safety testing besides regular testing techniques (Non-Functional, Functional and Integration testing)
- Testing should be done keeping in mind the safety and regulatory standards- as any error can cause a direct effect on patient’s life
- Testing team needs to be well aware of the various functionalities, clinical usage, and the environment the software will be used for
- A health-care product should comply with various standards like FDA, ISO, and CMMI before it can be used
- Cross dependency of software- testers need to ensure that any changes in one component or layer should not lead to side effect on the other.