Most Australian businesses use some kind of scheduling, contact management and communication software e.g. Microsoft Office/ 365, Google Apps etc…on a variety of devices e.g. PC/ Mac, Tablet/ iPad, Smart Phone, in running their businesses electronically anytime and from anywhere.

However, within the Australian Allied Health sector there are a number of important requirements that general business software don’t offer.

Those important requirements among other things are purpose built workflows to support the clinical and business management requirements of Allied Healthcare providers as well as Privacy Act and other regulatory requirements set out by the likes of the Australian Health Practitioner Regulation Authority (AHPRA), Payers (Workcover, Private Health Insurers, Medicare), Privacy Act and the Australian Digital Health Agency (ADHA)

So as you can imagine, designing, developing and shipping software in healthcare requires a lot to think about.  Especially when you have a lofty goal of helping every subscriber of coreplus to “practice happy”.

A big part of this understanding what is great User Experience (UX) and translating that into great User Interface (UI) design. I’m not going to talk here today about our UX/ UI programs, but one thing is for sure…that any quality issues in shipped software will take away from achieving our goals.

So in this respect, I wanted to share with you some insights that I’ve developed in my time at coreplus.  The experience has helped me grow as an individual as well as at a professional level.

You see, when it comes to Quality Assurance (QA) within our product, I’m part of a team whose responsibility it is to quality assure publishing of updated aspects of coreplus.

Here are the key reasons that the use of a QA team provides benefits to both coreplus and clients.

1. Delivery of a bug-free product that can avoid data loss or prevent loss of data integrity is hugely important in the healthcare sector due to the sensitive and private nature of client’s customers’ information. The quality team at coreplus provide the utmost care in attention to detail when making sure out client’s data remains secure. The QA team have developed rigorous test suites which are executed and analysed in fine detail before any new developments are delivered to our clients.
2. If a client finds a defect in coreplus (which happens on occasions) normally the process is; a client would contact the coreplus customer success team (CST) resulting in a logged support ticket, the defect is then added to the development team’s schedule, developed in the allocated development cycle, released to the QA team, and providing it passes testing it is then released to the public. By continuously refining our test regime to be more rigorous we can find these defects before they get to client, saving time by avoiding another development cycle and delivering a better product to our clients the first time it is released.

So you can see from the above that dealing with a complex set of requirements that are specific to Australian Allied Health practitioners’ needs, we have a lot of work to do in quality assuring coreplus.  Our systems are constantly learning and improving based on our own internal processes, as well as working with engaged subscribers who interact with us to ensure coreplus works as it’s intended to.

We have a great program designed to get you to directly tell us your thoughts on our we can improve coreplus and improve our overall quality.  See this great article by our Chief Product Owner on the “ideas portal” for more information.