Overview
The Healthcare and Life Sciences (HCLS) industry presents unique testing challenges. The search for new drugs remains incredibly competitive, and the IT infrastructure used for this is becoming ever-more complicated. With pharmaceutical companies under pressure, quality assurance teams need to make sure their applications run smoothly and efficiently.
In fact, reliability is a major concern for healthcare organizations – software errors in medical devices make up 21% of recalls. It’s vital that application testing is comprehensive, but this can be difficult and costly without automated testing tools.
Another big issue in the industry is the increasing pressure to adopt electronic health records (EHRs) in hospitals. As of 2009, only 2% of US hospitals met the federally mandated “meaningful use” standard that qualifies them for government financial incentives.
All these factors mean that there’s a demand for faster development of healthcare applications, without any loss of quality and new software for testing. eggPlant can help organizations meet that demand by providing a simple, platform-independent way for test automation.
The Challenge
Software testing can be particularly challenging in the HCLS industry. Some common challenges include:
- Testing applications within the firewalls
- Compliance with government regulations, such as FDA 21 CFR Part 11
- Ensuring interoperability of electronic health records (EHRs)
- Introducing test tools that can compliment Agile environments
- Improving time to market for applications
- Testing medical devices in a non-intrusive manner
- Tools to enable thorough mobile testing of new applications
The Solution
eggPlant is a faster and easier way to do a variety of application testing including browser testing, data driven testing and load testing. The visual testing tool is based on image recognition – it searches and compares multiple screens simultaneously, and compares images to check for inconsistencies and errors. Results are consolidated into a single results table, so testers can immediately identify where problems lie.
eggPlant eliminates the need for time-consuming manual testing, meaning quality assurance teams can carry out the full range of tests, from load testing to regression testing, quickly and at significantly reduced cost. As a result, healthcare applications can be brought to market much faster. This is particularly useful when establishing a new EHR system.
Because eggPlant works by examining images rather than the deep technical processes of an application, it’s a completely non-invasive test tool. That makes it ideal for testing medical devices without risk of disrupting the potentially life-saving machine. Tests can also be carried out securely, inside an organization’s firewall.
Whatever test cycles are run, all results are securely logged in easy-to-read tables for compliance and auditing purposes.eggPlant slots easily into existing test setups, and can significantly reduce the cost and effort of quality assurance.
Example
Click on the video to see eggPlant testing an EHR/EMR application
