Electronic Health Reporter

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.

After all, there’s no point in releasing telehealth-based apps and systems to the industry and to the public if the data used in these technologies haven’t been tested efficiently.

To get that job done, and to ensure new digitally-based data tools are in “continuous release” mode during the pandemic, digital healthcare providers must test their software data first and they must do so quickly.

By allowing health care software providers to automate the quality assurance processes, automated testing is instrumental in releasing digital healthcare tools safely, quickly, and efficiently. In doing so, the health care sector reaps the following benefits.

Managing overwhelming testing requirements. With automated testing and quality controls, health care software providers can streamline their own patient testing rollouts, with the full knowledge that the data they’re using is error-free, reliable, and quickly available for mounting demands for COVID-19 testing.

In many cases, artificial intelligence-powered COVID patient testing can cut wait times by over 200%, thus enabling health care centers to test more, test more accurately, and gain the data they need to stem the coronavirus tide.

Cutting down on paperwork – and speeding up patient care practices. Healthcare industry administrative routinely staffers spend hours, even days, compiling, organizing and disseminating patient record data – and that was before the pandemic.

Now, with automated data testing, systems administrators can run quality control testing programs at speeds that are at least five times faster than traditional manual software testing. With faster software testing comes faster digital products deliveries that can cut hospital and clinic patient paperwork backlogs by hours while eliminating cost-intensive errors in the process.

Faster and better communications with remote workers. By testing product data faster and getting digital workplace tools in the hands of workers more quickly, front-line hospitals, clinics, and other care centers get the tools they need to communicate with co-workers remotely.

That means getting better data to make better decisions, cut down on communication times between on-the-spot caretakers and virtual support staff, and a substantial improvement in enterprise mobility services.

With better, safer, and more error-free digital tools in place, health care providers can do what they do best – provide services and support for patients straightaway – without worrying about high-risk business continuity problems.