The employees and consultants who are overseeing UConn Health’s conversion to a modern electronic medical record system are now well into what is probably the most important stretch of the testing phase.
The second of five planned rounds of integrated testing is underway. If you liken it to a theater production, the show has been cast and the actors know their lines, and now they’re starting to rehearse together on stage.
In this case, the stage is the fourth floor of the Connecticut Tower, which has been converted into an area designated for this purpose through the end of December. Integrated testing started July 31 and represents the largest part of the overall testing phase.
“Each analyst represents a different piece of the system,” says HealthONE business system analyst Margo Higginbotham. “They’ve kind of been in their little silos for a while now. When we say integrated, it’s them now coming together and saying, ‘Oh, so when I do that, it affects you.’ That’s the whole point of this, to identify defects now so next time we run them, we’ll see if it makes it through.”
There are nearly 150 scripts, or workflows, to test over the next three months to determine which pieces of the process are working properly. These scripts represent approved current and future state patient workflows and how HealthONE will handle them, for example from registration to admittance to recovery to medications to discharge and billing.
“Now is the time to find those defects in between each of their applications, or something that would have executed in one system but isn’t working as planned when integrated with another application,” says HealthONE application architect Trisha Faraday. “Those are the defects that we’re now finding.”
During the first three weeks, or Round 1, the analysts ran 95 scripts, 34 of which passed. They expect to execute most of the rest during Round 2, which started this week. Some of the scripts that didn’t pass in Round 1 are back in Round 2 to see if the defects have been successfully resolved. Others need more time to be fixed and will return to testing in Round 3.
“Testing it now in this environment is where you’re going to be able to fix it with the least amount of impact to the user,” Faraday says. “This will make things run smoothly and efficiently when we’re ready to present it to the end users during the workflow walkthrough this fall.”
A better than 33 percent pass rate far surpassed expectations for the first round.
“We got off to a great start,” Higginbotham says. “Round 1 confirmed that our adoption, build, and testing efforts so far have been successful. It also helped us zero in on early opportunities for improvement.”
Faraday, Higginbotham, and Donatienne Noel, a consultant with experience with Epic, the HealthONE software vendor, make up the quality assurance group, which facilitates the integrated testing. They serve as a support system to the analysts.
“The testers are executing their scripts diligently; and are seeing the bigger picture of the application and how it is fully integrated,” Noel says. “The practice of testing is allowing them to verify whether the actual build matches the expected results and to ensure that software system defects are at a minimum prior to go-live.”
The overall testing phase is scheduled to run through the end of March and overlap with end-user training, which is scheduled to start Feb. 1. The go-live date is April 28.
“Probably the most encouraging thing is how well the analysts work together in the testing room,” Faraday says. “They go in there with a great mindset of, ‘We’re going to get this script done,’ and they really work as a team.”
More information about HealthONE is available at uconnhealthexpress.uchc.edu/emr.