Resources
Continuing the Healthcare Testing Evolution
As we are about to enter our 30th year in business, and our technology TestStream’s 20th birthday is in a couple of months, we are looking back at how and why TestStream was “born”. A computer program is BORN…? Yes — given the learning intelligence TestStream uses to test healthcare systems, coupled with its ability to share its knowledge of vendor system issues found with all other TestStream installations around the world, it is truly a virtual living entity — growing and learning continuously to provide the constant up-to-date system analysis and validation of healthcare systems.
In our first decade, we created test tools and wrote scripts to test applications. But, as we found quickly, healthcare applications are very different from any other industry. With increased system complexity and the constantly changing patient history and activity, this created a real problem for implementing effective testing strategies using the standard testing approach. Static end-to-end test scripts stopped working because of the changes occurring. The bulk of the effort was instead devoted to “fixing” static scripts to work in a dynamic environment — not a very good long-term Quality Assurance strategy or use of valuable technical resources.
In 1996, TestStream was “born” to approach the validation of healthcare clinical systems in a very unique way. Rather than script what to do next, TestStream was created and “taught” how to look at the screen and work out on its own how to determine what action or sequence of actions to perform next. This learned intelligence and accumulated system knowledge for the first time allowed an automation product to navigate through each patient journey independently, regardless of what the next action is, adapting along the way through literally thousands of patient journey test case combinations — without breaking. Now the patient has allergies defined…okay, no problem, TestStream can accommodate… Now the patient is discharged and has become an outpatient…no problem, TestStream processes it correctly. TestStream’s uncanny ability to navigate the system like a human being would finally solve the problem of truly automating the large-scale testing of clinical systems, regardless of vendor version or graphical user interface customizations.
Earlier this year we released the 14th generation in this intelligence system, which was the next major leap in this “Testing Evolution” (#TestingEvolution). It allowed us to branch out quickly into other systems and to cover more areas of Cerner Millennium, Sunquest and Epic.
We are excited to leap into 2016 knowing that TestStream”s intelligent approach to maintaining healthcare systems will greatly improve the safety for patients worldwide for many years to come. Going into 2016, we already see many hospitals joining the “Testing Evolution”!