Friday, March 30, 2012

ICD-10 Application Integration Testing Considerations & Tips

For many healthcare organizations, testing ICD-10 will be a hugely non-trivial undertaking. Due to the number of interdependencies, integration testing will be particularly cumbersome and requires careful planning to identify the groups of applications that comprise an integration test unit. As applications and business processes are assessed, you need to give a lot of thought and careful planning as to how you will apply and roll out changes to your applications and business processes.
Here are some considerations and tips for testing your ICD-10 applications:
1.      Look at business domains for apps/systems that will see the most impact from the ICD10 changes. The most important systems will likely be those that revolve around your core claims process and enterprise reporting platforms. These systems may serve as the root of your application “grouping” strategy.

2.      Have the folks that are closest to the work involved with test planning to make sure that your technical teams are making the right decisions.

3.      A key factor in determining these groups will be whether 3rd party COTS systems are involved and the vendor’s approach and schedule for ICD-10 compliance.Consider tools and services for clearly documenting and simplifying your testing requirements and processes so they can be performed by the lowest level resources possible and/or outsourced.

4.     Consider building tools and ‘stubs” to enable integration test progress in advance of remediating all components in an integration test group.

Given the current ICD-10 delay scenario, you would do well to use some extra time to consider how you’ll test your applications.  Building in some quality up front is more than just an industry buzzword.

For additional information on ICD-10 testing, see my previous blog posts:



2 comments:

  1. They are indeed really good tips. I'll have them in consideration.

    ReplyDelete
  2. It’s a very useful & qualitative information shared on integration testing. Indeed a nice share.
    Keep up the good work! :)

    ReplyDelete

Note: Only a member of this blog may post a comment.