The various dimensions of the healthcare industry are rapidly changing shape and the industrialists, the health care providers and the patients; everyone needs to be aware of it. There has been tremendous development in the healthcare technology trends, over the past few years, with Quality Assurance (QA), Artificial Intelligence (AI), Machine Learning (ML), etc., playing a pivotal role in rendering exceptional results. According to HealthTech, Dr. Felix Matthews, MD, and Physician leader at Deloitte has said that “We’re seeing a shift away from using technology to advance specialty care and high-tech medicine and a shift toward using technology to enable prevention and primary care.” He also insists that hospitals and healthcare professionals need to identify the right tools and technology to invest in tackling the upcoming challenges and catering to maximum patients.
The upcoming Healthcare Technology Trends
The future of the Healthcare sector is very promising and brings along tremendous opportunities, with the global health care spending expected to rise at a CAGR of 5% during 2019-23. Stakeholders need to invest strategically by navigating through various factors like:
- Rising pre-valance of chronic diseases
- Increasing population
- Growing aging population
- Workforce shortages
- Higher labor costs
- Infrastructure investments
- Technological advancements
- Evolution of care models
- Expanding health care systems in developing markets
While working towards the goal of disease eradication, companies need to focus on quality improvement in the healthcare sector to efficiently meet the data maintenance requirements and provide 100% customer satisfaction. This makes it mandatory to expand the Healthcare IT Integration Market, to serve the need for optimum data management and seamless access to data records. According to the current situation in Hospitals all over the world, the following Healthcare technological trends will emerge from embracing the new demands arising in the Health sector.
- QA in the Healthcare Sector
- Artificial Intelligence
- Moving to Cloud for faster data transfer
- Using Big Data for Quality Improvement
- 5G Services for faster data handling
Let us talk about the role of Quality Assurance in the Healthcare Sector, as it plays a pivotal role in the years to come.
QA in the Healthcare Sector
Quality is a critical factor in maintaining the efficacy and profitability of the healthcare sector. To deliver the best quality care services rapidly to the patients, there have been many innovations in the industry to pace up with the digital revolution around the world. QA and testing are integral to leverage the benefits of design, advanced analytics, and gain accuracy and precision while improving the overall performance of the system.
Quality Assurance is essential in the hospitals and the healthcare sector, as it helps in accurately identifying the diseases and treating them quickly as well. The demand for interoperability, increased usage of end-user technology compliance and regulatory compliance and testing of healthcare apps, needs expertise in the technology, along with ample time and resources. Using best practices and cost-effective QA testing in the healthcare sector will help in swiftly drifting from traditional to tech-advanced processes to provide better customer satisfaction. QA testing in Healthcare can be done either manually or through test automation tools, like Selenium. Testing healthcare mobile apps need strong expertise in various testing domains, like performance testing, load testing, multi-platform testing, etc. Testing on cloud platforms like Azure, AWS, Google Cloud, etc. is also crucial to achieve the best results. iOS, Android and Windows platforms need to be tested as well, for effective operations on the mobile phones of the healthcare apps. The main aspects of the QA in the Healthcare sector are:
- Testing
- Quality Assurance
- Quality Control
Quality Assurance (QA) is the process that ensures that the quality of the Healthcare app or software is achieved as per the expectations of the service provider, doctors, and patients, respectively. Maintaining consistency of quality throughout the system is a crucial aspect and supports the optimum performance of healthcare software products. The specific needs of the end-users, like the patients, insurers, caregivers, hospital management staff, and other stakeholders involved, must be addressed while developing the healthcare software applications. QA Testing in the healthcare sector should be done considering the various aspects of user requirements. The process of Quality Control involves the establishment of specific protocols that are used to elevate the service quality and provide complete customer satisfaction. The main goal is to deliver customer contentment by ensuring user-friendly, feature-rich, and intuitive healthcare app. Proper testing of the application should be done thoroughly to test all the enhancement features and installations to gauge the quality of the performance and ensure seamless, smooth, and consistent functioning at all platforms for the best user experience.
Testing Challenges in the Healthcare Application
The QA specialists, developers, and testers need to carefully approach, comprehend and analyze different user scenarios, considering specific user requirements of patients, insurers, caregivers, hospital administrative staff, and any other concerned person using the app. For example, a patient will need to access his health records regularly and would prefer to keep safe all the related documents, while using the healthcare app. The healthcare provider or the insurer should have access to the health records of all the patients so that it can be referred to in case of a teleconference or urgent need by the patient. So, proper QA testing of mobile healthcare apps ensures that versatile user requirements are fulfilled in all the respective scenarios. The QA testers and developers need to have a holistic approach for software usability to keep all the users satisfied.
So, adopting Agile technologies and implementing healthcare QA in the healthcare industry will provide effective and robust healthcare app solutions to patients, doctors, insurers, hospital management staff, and all the related personals to render improved quality in the healthcare sector. Using smart and technologically advanced QA testing methods will ensure better end-user satisfaction while removing gaps in the app.
Author Bio: Claire Mackerras is a Senior QA Engineer & Editor associated with Bugraptors which is a certified company providing qa testing services globally. She is passionate about writing on technological trends for manual & automation software testing. She likes to share her knowledge, for the readers who are interested in exploring testing tacts and trends.
