May 26
2020
Why It’s Mission-Critical For Healthcare IT To Provide Continuous Delivery In This Current Environment
By Guljeet Nagpaul, chief product officer, ACCELQ.
COVID-19 has taken a heavy toll on the U.S. and the world.
Cases and deaths continue to rise as major global economies slide into recession – or worse.
One rare, but burgeoning area of positive growth in the pandemic is telehealth. Medical services and data shares electronically has stood tall during the current health crisis.
According to data from Mordor Intelligence, the global telehealth market will grow to an estimated value of $66 billion by 2021.
Telehealth is particularly growing in data-intensive healthcare industry sectors like record-keeping, telehealth sessions and virtual, video-based doctor appointments, and the surging e-prescription sector, where physicians are increasingly able to issue prescriptions via a mobile app.
The healthcare industry is also experiencing a rise in digital epidemiology tools, chatbot systems, EHR guidance tools and rapid-response COVID-19 testing kits, among other digital-based solutions.
These tools are increasingly needed by health care practitioners to stem the COVID-19 tide – and any delays getting them into health professionals hands is a delay that coronavirus caretakers and patients can’t afford to take.
A Need for Testing and Quality Assurance
Still, even at a time of pandemic, those delays are only all too real – and the problem often lies in the archaic structure of the health care sector.
Case in point. While the coronavirus crisis has driven the need for new digital tools that have fueled a health care system transformation, the bureaucratic rigidity the health care still exists. Even as digital tools recast the entire health industry model, old problems remain, especially in the centralized and technologically inefficient modes of data management.
That’s where good data software testing and quality assurance come into play, in the form of test automation. As automation becomes the software development standard for revenue-minded companies, regular testing is required to make sure productivity and security activities are above board, and is critical in getting the digital healthcare products and services out the door and into hospitals and care centers as quickly as possible.