Content 1. Big Data Analytics in Healthcare 2. 7 key benefits of using Big Data Analytics in Healthcare   2.1 Improves patient healthcare   2.2 Predicts patients at higher risk quickly & efficiently   2.3 Eases patient diagnostics with EHRs   2.4 Ensures to reduce overall healthcare costs   2.5. Delivers greater insights into patient cohorts   2.6 Enables improved healthcare with fitness devices   2.7 Generates real-time alerting 3. Conclusion

In today’s world, it is a fact that digitization has been adopted across industries such as telecom, banking, pharmaceuticals, healthcare, FinTech, EdTech, etc. The adaptation of digitization of healthcare has more significance than other sectors as it contains the medical data related to patients, their diagnosis, treatment schedules, imaging results etc. which generates huge volumes of data which has been collectively named as big data.

Big Data Analytics in Healthcare

Typically, this big data refers to the abundant health data amassed from numerous ways of electronic health records (EHRs), medical imaging, genomic sequencing, X-rays, and diagnostic reports, etc.

Importantly, big data has changed the way doctors and healthcare professional use, manage, and analyze this critical data to ensure better patient outcomes. Interestingly, to analyze these numerous amounts of big data, effective techniques of statistical analysis is required.

This statistical analysis or the big data analytics helps to predict hidden information and this healthcare analytics has the potential to deliver numerous advantages to patients.

Big data Analytics Stats

According to Allied Market Research, Big data analytics in healthcare is the complex process of examining big data to discover information including hidden patterns, market trends, unknown correlations, and customer preferences, which can help organizations to make informed clinical and business decisions.

The global big data analytics in healthcare market size was valued at $16.87 billion in 2017, and is projected to reach $67.82 billion by 2025, growing at a CAGR of 19.1% from 2018 to 2025.

Hence, by using new technological improvements like Big data analytics, the enormous volumes of big data in healthcare are converted into useful, and actionable information that continues to deliver great insights to doctors, healthcare providers and patients in an effective way. The usage of big data analytics in healthcare brings about lot of positive and life-saving patient outcomes. Leveraging big data analytics in healthcare brings in many more benefits which have been detailed below.

7 key benefits of using Big Data Analytics in Healthcare

1. Improves patient healthcare:

The significant benefit from the knowledge derived from big data analytics delivers greater clinical insights to various healthcare providers. These cutting-edge analytics improves patient care in the healthcare system as this data facilitates doctors to prescribe effective treatment and make clinical decisions more accurate further eliminating any ambiguity involved in the treatment.

Big data analytics seems to bring in a change in healthcare which is moving towards bringing in better patient outcomes as the data is used to discover which practices are most effective for patients.

2. Predicts patients at higher risk quickly & efficiently:

While considering the population-wide data for a particular area, specifically predictive analytics pinpoints which segment of the patients are at higher risk for diseases and hints for early intervention to protect them. This sort of prediction is more suitable for depictions with respect to certain chronic diseases.

Predictive analytics is drawn by aggregating data that are related to a variety of factors which includes patient’s medical history, demographic area data, socio-economic profile data, patient’s comorbidities existing in the area, etc.

3. Eases patient diagnostics with EHRs:

This is the most widespread application of big data in enabling effective patient diagnostics with every patient having their own electronic health records (EHRs). This EHRs includes the demographics, medical history, allergies of patients, diagnostic test results of current and previous illnesses along with other details.

These EH records are shared through secured information systems and are easily accessible by doctors and other healthcare professionals. They can access these files and the personal data cannot be modified but the diagnostics and treatment can be updated by the doctors. The EHRs can also trigger notifications alerting the patients about their forthcoming doctors or diagnostic visits and even track their prescriptions.

4. Ensures to reduce overall healthcare costs:

Healthcare providers can leverage the electronic health records (EHRs) which significantly helps to identify large patterns that lead to a greater understanding of patient’s health patterns. This in turn can essentially help cut costs by reducing unnecessary care or hospitalization.

Typically, the greater insights this analytics data gives to physicians truly translates to better patient care. This data also pinpoints them for shorter hospital stays, and in some cases for fewer admissions or re-admissions. This further helps patients with healthcare cost reduction due to lesser hospitalizations.

Moreover, by using predictive analytics, the data helps to estimate individual patient costs and helps to maximize healthcare efficiency enormously by carefully planning the treatment.

5. Delivers greater insights into patient cohorts:

By analyzing healthcare big data, it draws a greater insight into patient cohorts that are at greatest risk for various illnesses, and in a way helps to take out some proactive prevention measures.

Interestingly, this sort of analytics data can effectively be used to educate, inform and carefully motivate patients to take the responsibility for their own wellbeing. Moreover, by bringing over the clinical data together, it helps to bring in more effectiveness into the patient treatment plans which ensures better patient outcomes.

6. Enables improved healthcare with fitness devices:

Today, many consumer fitness products are available like Fitbit, and Apple Watch, etc. which keep a track on the physical activity levels of the users. The data thus collected by numerous devices used by people is sent to cloud servers, which is categorically being used by physicians to know the overall health and can even accordingly plan for individual’s wellness programs.

This analytical fitness products user data is analyzed which can be accessed by physicians to know about their physical activity levels and the data can also be used to know about specific health-related trends.

7. Generates real-time alerting:

There are specific medical healthcare decision support software that analyzes medical data on the spot that deliver real-time alerting to help healthcare providers who in turn use that real-time data to deliver better prescriptive decisions.

Doctors, in order to reduce the patient visits to hospitals are insisting on patients to use wearables which will collect patient’s health data continuously and sends the data to cloud. This data is accessed by doctors to prescribe medicines based on the results and values.

Conclusion

In today’s competitive world, latest technologies like big data analytics, artificial intelligence, machine learning are being used by healthcare organizations to gain real-time patient insights with huge data available in place.

Specifically, by using big data analytics in healthcare, it empowers with actionable insights on patient’s data and outcomes and ensures to reduce overall healthcare costs, predict high risk patients more quickly, generate real-time alerting and so on.

Healthcare solutions providers must ensure that their applications are high-performing and delivering great customer experience by enabling end-to-end digital testing of these healthcare solutions by leveraging next-gen testing services (www.testingxperts.com).

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Never has the world ever thought of such a massive disaster due to the merciless virus, COVID-19, that is affecting millions of humans across the globe. This is truly an unprecedented situation in the history of mankind that has spread rapidly from one part of the world to another rampantly.

Content 1. Surge in Need for Medical devices during Covid-19 Pandemic 2. Types of software testing in medical devices 3. Leverage TestingXperts Services for Medical Devices Software Testing Amidst Pandemic 4. Conclusion

This current pandemic 2020 has spread to more than 210 countries across the world causing a mere lockdown of people’s occupations, activities, and livelihood, with underlying essentiality for maintaining social distancing and enlightening the need for more health awareness.

Further, with the ever-increasing incidence of Coronavirus cases growing exponentially, healthcare stakeholders across the globe search for tools and medications to help quickly stem this unexpected tide of disease spread.

Undoubtedly, Covid-19 pandemic is affecting every industry sector in different ways, but healthcare is at the forefront with increasing demand for medical devices mounting more pressure from all means across the globe with less supply all around.

Surge in Need for Medical devices during Covid-19 Pandemic

It is an eye-striking fact that within a few months of the Coronavirus outbreak, as millions get affected due to the virus, it is resulting in shortages of the medical equipment and medical devices. Essentially effective and quality medical equipment is the need of the hour to save millions of lives as coronavirus affected critical cases continue to increase globally.

Some of the most important medical devices as stated by FDA include Cardiovascular, Ophthalmic, infusion pumps, clinical electronic thermometers, respirators, ventilators and accessories, remote monitoring devices, equipment for various diagnostic tests, etc.

According to a recent article on “United States: Impact of Coronavirus on Medical Devices,” the authors say that under normal circumstances, the medical device industry would be challenged to meet the demand for products required to treat a pandemic. These challenges may well be worsened by challenges in the production and supply chain due to mandated shutdowns of manufacturing facilities, or quarantine of production workers from a shuttered facility.

Evidently, medical devices are critical as they have a direct impact on human lives survival as the readings they show greatly impact the course of treatment that is given to the people. Primarily, the medical devices usability should be seamless and should deliver perfect results.

The FDA also has a public health responsibility to oversee the safety and effectiveness of medical devices – including mobile medical apps and listed many policies recently.

If these critical medical devices software does not function well in these pandemic times, then it causes a great risk to patient’s healthcare.

Hence, software testing of medical devices is crucial to function effectively and to ensure proper testing figures while tests are performed using these devices on people.

Therefore, these devices should perform seamlessly and especially during these pandemic times should be fully functional to ensure proper test results. In order to achieve effective software functioning of these medical devices they should be thoroughly tested to ensure proper functioning and maintenance of these devices.

Types of Software Testing in Medical Devices:

1. End-to-end medical device usability testing should be taken up to ensure the medical devices are defect-free and can be used for testing and treating patients.

2. Medical devices should be tested for compliance based on relevant standards.

3. The medical devices user interface should be tested as the user experience and customer feedback typically proves to be a crucial factor that can determine the success of an entire product.

4. With more mobile medical devices in use, the patient data security in these devices should be taken up with effective security testing to ensure a secured product is available for use.

Conclusion

This is an important time with the widespread pandemic attacks across the globe and evidently, at this hour, it is necessary that the healthcare medical devices function seamlessly. These medical devices when connected with other devices should work well and deliver appropriate readings of patients.

Thus, in order to achieve effective devices test results and proper functioning, it is essential that the software of medical devices work well under all conditions. Medical devices should be tested for each functionality and should be fully-functional.

Hence, leverage next-gen medical devices testing services providers to ensure your devices work effectively. Therefore, to ensure safe and effective healthcare services to patients in this much needed hour of COVID-19 pandemic, end-to-end medical devices testing for softwares is a must.

Leverage TestingXperts Services for Medical Devices Software Testing Amidst Pandemic.

Some of our Medical Devices Testing Services:

– Security/Auditing Compliance of Health Care Applications including HIPAA Compliance. – Medical Transcription Applications and Workflow Frameworks – Data Capture Services for Clinical Data and Research – Bespoke Hospital Management Systems, CRMs, Clinic Management Applications, Patient Record Systems, Electronic Medical Records Management Systems

– Maintenance and Warranty Applications for medical equipment maintenance

– Healthcare Mobile Applications Testing (iPhone, iPad, Windows Mobile, Palm) for Doctors for e-Signatures and Patient Medical Records

– Application Integration Services for various Health Care Application Modules and third-party applications and Insurance Providers

The post Medical Device Testing and Its Criticality Amidst Covid-19 Pandemic first appeared on TestingXperts.

What is Digital Transformation in Healthcare?

Forbes in their article on Healthcare Growth Drivers 2020 states that the digital transformation of healthcare will gain momentum. The drivers include better tools such as AI (Artificial Intelligence) and virtual trials to empower patient outcomes, maturation of funding to public markets, regulatory innovation, technology adoption and more alliances between entrepreneurs and large companies.

With digitalization on the rise, these health-care systems have become safer, more affordable, and more accessible to patients. Moreover, it has made healthcare companies to rethink business processes and make it more patient-centric and affordable. Therefore, using digital technologies in healthcare places the patient is at the center of the eco-system and ensures to deliver better healthcare outcomes.

Significantly, an effective digital transformation in healthcare requires at first place a cultural change. This facet encompasses implementing new business models, along with evolving new and different ways of thinking within the healthcare enterprises. It perhaps also demands effective management and communication delivered to patients, and handling of various compliances and regulations while ensuring to be digital. Primarily, digital health ensures and drives effective patient engagement and better healthcare outcomes.

What are Benefits of Digital Transformation in Healthcare?

Digital transformation in healthcare redefines how people, technology and devices interact and connect seamlessly further:

– It helps to promote better patient care

– Reduces overall healthcare costs

– Improves patient outcomes

– Enables a superior healing experience for patients

– Helps clinical and administrative staff to deliver safer, timely, and higher quality care

– Supports new care approaches and solutions to make healthcare delivery less expensive and more efficient

– It makes healthcare accessible to all and enables enhanced healthcare pathways

Although digital health has tremendous potential to improve quality and reduce costs in healthcare, there are five major areas of digital healthcare that need effective testing solutions to fully realize its potential.

Therefore, it is essential to bring together the emerging trends of network infrastructure security, mobility and cloud access, IoT smart devices and usage of AI in healthcare, to be properly aligned to ensure the success of digital healthcare.

Which Emerging Trends in Digital Healthcare Need Testing Solutions?

1. Mobility and Cloud Access Priority:

Today, undoubtedly the game-changer is an expansion of mobile apps access to data that is maintained on the cloud, ensuring quick and easy access. This sort of continuous access through mobile apps eases patient care and clinicians also get to know the clinical reports and patient data instantly. With electronic medical records (EMR) in the cloud, patients and doctors can access medical data 24/7.

Moreover, in hospitals, the concept of mobile-first has been on demand. These mobile apps should be tested thoroughly by embracing mobile application testing as patient data is critical and only accurate data stands valid.

Any error in medical record data would cost the healthcare providers largely and hence, end-to-end mobile application testing has to be taken up by manufacturers.

2. IoT Smart Healthcare Devices:

There has been an increased usage of IoT connected devices that prove to improve outcomes and patient engagements. Specifically, these IoT systems range from connected medical devices such as MRI, CT scanners, wearable devices, remote patient monitors, video conferencing digital devices, telemedicine devices, and security cameras.

These connected devices have made digital health accessible even in remote areas. These connected healthcare devices ensure better patient care and deliver better patient outcomes but evidently, medical devices and software should be tested thoroughly to ensure effective results.

3. AI Role in Digital Health:

Forbes states that Artificial Intelligence (AI) in healthcare is a giant opportunity to help revolutionize patient outcomes and reduce costs. AI is a powerful way to redefine data and its predictions by using algorithms. It provides a profound understanding of critical diseases such as cancer, genetic diseases, and others, thus paving the way for enabling better treatment to patients with quick identification of disease stage.

It has also been observed that various pharmaceutical and other healthcare companies are deploying machine learning algorithms for exploring chemical and biological interactions to develop new drugs and get predictions replacing the age-old process of conducting only clinical trials.

4. Network Infrastructure Security:

The network infrastructure of healthcare organizations is the foundation of digital transformation, as robust, secure and resilient connectivity is vital. This infrastructure component optimizes the pathway across the healthcare ecosystem. Therefore, it is evident that a secure network lays the ground for delivering secure data, applications, mobility and IoT connectivity that ultimately drives outstanding patient care and improves healthcare outcomes. Thus, in order to ensure network security across the digital platform, it is essential to leverage security testing to avoid threats and vulnerabilities.

5. Cyber Security Across Digital Devices:

Hacking and cyber-attacks are common today in the data networks which has become a major concern for healthcare organizations. The massive Wannacry cyberattack infiltrated hospital networks across Europe and North America and posed a halt to their medical services.

Healthcare IoT systems are more vulnerable to hacking and threats as the proliferation of sensors and connected devices greatly expand and ease network attacks. Many healthcare IoT devices are manufactured without following security measures and continue to be more susceptible.

Hence, these connected systems and devices are becoming susceptible to attacks affecting hospitals, and clinics. Further, the manufacturers should leverage security testing services to ensure effective devices are set in place.

6. Chatbots Serving as Digital Assistants:

The digital assistants also commonly named Chatbots are a subset derived using AI, ML and NLP technologies. A digital assistant can speak different languages and becomes handy through its support for voice and text messages. These chatbots effectively store and process the data as self-learners. They provide a personalized experience to patients and some of them even provide emotional support to patients.

Particularly, these assistants can be used to answer frequently asked questions FAQ, suggest products, take orders, handle payments and organize meetings and notifications on a need-based across the digital healthcare domain. Chatbots should be tested with real-time scenarios to enable the best outcomes while embedding them in healthcare channels.

What are the challenges faced with healthcare digitalization?

Challenges with Respect to Incurring Costs: Healthcare organizations aim to drive more revenue from the small investments they do and this could be an essential factor that hinders them from moving towards digitalization. But, incurring costs is essential for today’s enterprises as without digitalization businesses cannot survive in today’s competitive healthcare world.

Challenges with new change adoptions: Another reason why many of the healthcare businesses place a back step is due to the fear and concern to accept any new change. Legacy systems or remaining on the same platform may not be a good sign for them as new technologies are trending and need to be adopted to stay aligned in the industry and be ahead of competitors by adopting new changes aligned with digitalization.

Challenge to maintain effective data aggregation: In healthcare industries, the amount of data generated in a day is massive. Yet, the challenge is how the data is managed. With the siloed data across the industry, it becomes inefficient for the industries to perform the required data segregation and interoperability. And, this largely affects the customer experience and might affect their brand. Thus, it becomes essential to integrate the data from all systems and ensure proper collaboration to ensure proper data access and usage.

Challenge to maintain secured data: The ever-changing digitalizing technology within the healthcare industry is providing many ways to increase productivity and at the same time it is experiencing security issues with cyber-attacks. When considering the medical sector, every electronic medical record maintained by the enterprise maintains the personal and sensitive data of the user. If the growing number of cyber-breaches continues to occur, it probably affects the user’s trust and the company’s brand. Hence, to ensure a secure environment that can overcome the cyber-breaches, healthcare businesses need to adopt security testing services from a next-gen testing service provider. 

Conclusion

By taking a comprehensive approach to digitization, healthcare organizations can deliver services more quickly, and deliver better patient care with low costs. The major facets of the digital healthcare domain are revolving around network security, IoT smart devices, usage of AI and chatbots in the healthcare channels.

Undoubtedly, digital technology in the healthcare industry is fast proving to be a game-changer and in order to get the complete benefits out of the system, end-to-end software testing services should be taken up by next-gen testing service providers.

The post How Digital Transformation is Redefining Healthcare in 2022? first appeared on TestingXperts.

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To provide quality and real-time services to their patients, healthcare professionals require digital applications that are user-friendly, interoperable and accessible anytime and anywhere. The market for digital applications, and for healthcare IT in general, has been rising steadily and is attracting new investments to make healthcare more accessible and data-based. Contents 1. Emerging QA and … Continue reading "5 Emerging QA and Software Testing Trends in Healthcare Digital Applications"

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To provide quality and real-time services to their patients, healthcare professionals require digital applications that are user-friendly, interoperable and accessible anytime and anywhere. The market for digital applications, and for healthcare IT in general, has been rising steadily and is attracting new investments to make healthcare more accessible and data-based.

Contents 1. Emerging QA and Software Testing Trends in Healthcare Applications 2. High Priority to Security Testing 3. Big Data Management 4. Implementation of Agile Testing Methodologies 5. Emphasis on Mobile and Compatibility Testing 6. Deployment of Skilled Testers 7. Conclusion

High costs of research and development along with stringent regulations and increasing user demands necessitate a sharp focus on software quality within the healthcare industry. Organizations need to create customized and modern testing strategy based on emerging testing trends. All these trends may not pertain equally to each healthcare organization but will differ based on the nature and usage of healthcare solutions as well as according to the specialized testing needs of specific healthcare providers.

What are the benefits of healthcare apps?

– Healthcare apps help the patients to book their doctor appointments easily and to get important healthcare tips

– It is the quickest way to view medical test reports, to purchase medicines online, and to find an expert specialist

– The chat facility provided by the healthcare apps is simplifying the treatment process, the doctors can chat and treat their patients in chats

– The Electronic Health Records or EHR helps to understand the patient’s history of diseases, etc.

– The feature of reminding medicines to the patient is one of the best benefits of healthcare apps. Also, this advanced feature provides a confirmation to the doctors that the patient has not ignored and started the treatment

Why testing is essential for healthcare apps?

To verify the integration with other apps:

Healthcare is one of the biggest sectors providing a number of services for the patients. A single healthcare app may not be able to fulfill every need which a patient aspires for. And, this may make the patient plan for integrating with the other apps to fulfill the needs. Hence, the app should be tested to verify whether it is compatible to integrate with other apps or not.

To monitor the user-interface:

Healthcare is not similar to regular apps. Since the app is built for their patients, the app should be regularly monitored for its user-interface. Also, medical apps receive more data and may be used on a regular basis by their patients. Hence, the app should be tested to check if it is user-centric, patient-friendly, and providing a comfortable way to interact.

To verify privacy and security:

While planning to design an app, it is essential to focus on the privacy and security of the patient’s information. It should abide and comply with all the privacy standards to protect the patient’s medical record and other healthcare provider’s information. Also, the testing measures should be practiced to secure the app with data encryption and firewalls.

To check the app usability:

Before planning to launch the app to the real world, it is crucial to test the app usability. The app has to be user-friendly and should be able to provide a clear idea of its functionality to the user. If the app fails to receive user-acceptance, then, this may decrease the scope of the app’s future. Hence, it is necessary to practice usability testing before planning for production.

To check the app compatibility:

Users can use the healthcare app through any device and any platform. And, if the app fails to provide the same performance across the devices and platforms, then this will be the biggest drawback resulting in dissatisfaction among the users. Hence, performance and compatibility testing should be performed across the devices and different platforms such as windows, mac, android, etc.

To check the app performance:

The performance and functionality of the app are important factors to drive the scope of the app. The app has to function similarly across any platform and device, and also when the app is experiencing more number of users. If the app fails on performance and load issues, resulting unavailability for millions of patients may inbuilt a negative impact and drop off many of the users. Hence, load testing should be practiced to verify the app performance and functionality in all scenarios.

Emerging QA and Software Testing Trends in Healthcare Applications

High Priority to Security Testing

The cutting-edge healthcare solutions help physicians and healthcare providers to access historic health data of patients, observe their conditions, and offer treatment remotely and rapidly. Hence, it becomes important to ensure utmost security and privacy of the data that is accessed by the application. To achieve utmost security, extensive security testing has to be the key priority in the testing strategy for safeguarding the sensitive healthcare data of patients.

Big Data Management

Healthcare applications these days gather and transmit a huge amount of healthcare data from one source to another. Hence, the applications are specifically designed with explicit features to enable data collection, storage, access, and transfer. While testing next-generation healthcare applications, testers must keep in mind the complete patient data management process across various technological platforms. They must execute all obligatory tests to ensure that the patient data is managed efficiently, and without negotiating on security and privacy.

Implementation of Agile Testing Methodologies

The ever-rising need to get the applications and products faster to market necessitate the healthcare IT teams to adopt the Agile methodology. By the use of agile methodology, teams can escape the lengthy product delivery cycle and ensure quicker delivery in the end.

Emphasis on Mobile and Compatibility Testing

A huge percentage of users, including patients and healthcare professionals, these days access healthcare solutions on their mobile devices. There is an increase in the number of organizations enabling the patients to access healthcare on their smartphones, tablets, and other devices. Therefore, the healthcare solutions need to run efficiently and correctly on these devices, across various operating systems, browsers, etc. The esting strategy should include evaluating all aspects of the application by using various mobile devices, network, and operating systems.

Deployment of Skilled Testers

With several governmental mandates and user privacy issues taking over, healthcare application testing requires a lot of experience and skill. It is important to ensure the testers have correct domain knowledge and skills to evaluate the advanced healthcare applications and solutions efficiently. The testers working on healthcare projects should have skills and understanding in HIPAA, HL7 guidelines, and the Healthcare domain to identify critical workflows for testing effectively.

Conclusion

When it comes to healthcare imperatives involving patient driven and patient-centered care, having a cutting-edge software means nothing if it does not work in such a way that makes it easy to use for healthcare professionals and patients. At TestingXperts, we help healthcare providers transform innovative designs into reliable and successful applications with our specialized healthcare QA and software testing services. Connect with us now!

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