Securing Quality in Healthcare

Augmenting quality in healthcare apps requires you to move beyond the smooth functionality of the software to include other facets of the seamless patient experience. This means thoroughly understanding the user journey and validating all the use cases that will make or break a convenient user experience.

So, what are these use cases that differentiate a seamless user experience from a disappointing one:

#1 Easy-To-Use and Navigate?

Creating a healthcare app that is easy to use and seamless to navigate is no easy feat to achieve. It involves

• Having a detailed understanding of your audience’s needs?
• Marrying it to the available technology and business requirements
• Creating an app that will fulfill the above two while being closely anchored to user experience

But how do you validate if your app truly reflects all these aspects? That’s where the role of your QA team becomes crucial. An efficient tester would need to combine his/her testing expertise along with his business understanding to test and validate the app through the lenses of the end user. That would mean replicating the use cases and environments in that your customer will use the app and expanding the test coverage to cover all the highly likely possible scenarios that your user may encounter to uncover hidden defects and faults.

#2 Keeps Data Private and Secure

While the pandemic led to a significant rise in the adoption rate of mHealth apps, the increase in the adoption rate was not in sync with an augmentation in cybersecurity measures. Recent research showcases that the healthcare industry has especially lagged in building systems and processes to monitor for runtime cybersecurity threats and pre-emptively detect and plug them.?

This research also pointed out that one of the critical reasons for growing cybersecurity attacks on healthcare apps is the API vulnerabilities that go unchecked and unfixed, allowing easy access to customer data.?

API testing comes to the rescue in such scenarios. With a robust API test automation framework, not only do you get the ability to check for its functionality, but you are also able to detect all security loopholes for your dev teams to fix them early in the product development cycle.?

#3 Works Under All Conditions, Terrains and Networks

About two-thirds of India’s population resides in rural areas, and the introduction of mHealth apps has been a radical revolution in providing them access to quality healthcare.?

As declared by WHO in a recent conference, digital health has the potential to accelerate progress toward universal health coverage by improving the quality, accessibility, affordability and sustainability of healthcare services.

But all this strategic vision can only be fulfilled when these technological innovations work seamlessly in diverse geographies and across varying network connectivity. This includes checking if the app functionality is intact and if the data flow is frictionless across the multiplicity of medical devices and systems.

Test automation can help you achieve this by testing and validating your mHealth app under a variety of network strengths. What’s more, it can even validate your app’s performance across multiple browsers and operating systems and highlight defects. This ensures that all performance and lag issues are resolved way before your app is launched.

As a result, when your app continues to function smoothly in low-network areas while your competitors experience network errors, you know you have unintentionally gained a substantial competitive advantage over your peers and patient mindshare.

When Amazon acquired One Medical, (for $3.9 billion) in 2022, they stated that this acquisition was on the lines of immense opportunities they saw in improving the quality of the healthcare experience. Truly, technology has the potential to dramatically improve patient experience and make healthcare more accessible and affordable – but only when it is tested right and implemented seamlessly.

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