Each day I work closely with clients to understand, or in some cases, help to develop their EHR testing objectives. I try to ‘meet people where they are at’. Whether that is someone who’s read all of the TestStream documentation prior to our first introductory call and is ready to roll with minimal interaction, or maybe someone who’s just joined the IT team from a clinical role in the hospital and has no idea what their job will entail, my approach is to work with that person or their team until they feel completely comfortable on their own. Even when folks reach a very independent point, I like to continue to hold their hand as their testing objectives change, or they want to keep advancing their TestStream skills and perform more complex validations.

It never ceases to amaze me when the client or their team takes off on their own and starts making TestStream ‘walk & talk’ and do exactly what they want it to do … inclusive of some things that I would’ve never thought of!

A recent example of a client that had become very proficient using TestStream and was working to create a plan to test their newly built Meaningful Use reporting functionality. This reporting would require a complex series of queries and rules to mine the needed patient data. Their challenge was coming up with a way to create a statistically significant number of test patients that would be fully documented against to ensure that the proper data would and could be extracted. The client knew that TestStream could automatically register patients, document medications, allergies, problems, surgeries, clinical information, etc., so she created configurations to automate the population of the needed test patients and all of their associated clinical documentation. The Meaningful Use reporting methodology was then run against the large amount of patient and clinical data and presented a clear picture of how the new functionality was working. The client team was so excited to have saved the many hours it would’ve taken to populate the needed medical records for these test patients. They were also pleased to have been able to create many more test patients with complete medical records in an automated way than they ever could’ve managed if they had to do it manually. The words ‘getting our Geek On’ were thrown about when the project was completed  The fact that so few resources had leveraged the TestStream technology to accomplish such a daunting undertaking was truly remarkable.

I have several clients that are responsible for not only things like maintenance and regression testing, but actually domain integrity. I’m thrilled to have watched them bring TestStream into their everyday duties, and actually use it as their primary application for their work. The level of confidence they have obtained in the integrity of their Millennium system and related interfaces has been incredible.

It’s such a satisfying feeling when I see these new friends move from a point where they were testing maybe 3-5% of their build with Test Scripts (manually) evolve to the place where they kick off tests in TestStream on a Friday and have broad scale maintenance and/or regression tests in multiple Cerner solutions completed and waiting for them when they get to work on Monday morning.

Life is good working with these people.