In the last few years, healthcare providers have been using mobile apps and websites to communicate with patients and partners more efficiently. Healthcare companies can do all of this with APIs.
Healthcare APIs allow healthcare providers to create patient-facing apps that provide new ways for them to communicate with their patients via web, mobile and social media. Healthcare providers can also develop internal APIs to offer their partners new tools that streamline operations and improve quality of care. A well-tested API strategy is essential in healthcare. Healthcare is a highly competitive industry where you need to be able to quickly access the correct information.
Read also: How to choose between UI and API Testing
What is an app in healthcare?
Apps in the healthcare industry are programs that provide health-related services on mobile devices, such as tablets and smartphones. These healthcare software apps are often called mobile health (mHealth) or tele-health because they can be accessed by both patients and doctors at home and on the go.
What is API Testing?
API testing is a method of testing software to validate Application Programming Interfaces (APIs). API testing is a method of testing the functionality, reliability, and security of these programming interfaces. It often uses API testing tools. API testing focuses on the software’s business logic layer rather than the user interface.
Why is API Testing so Important for Healthcare?
Healthcare app development is especially dependent on API testing. Applications must comply with complex security and regulatory compliance requirements. Many QA teams create their software testing strategies to ensure HIPAA compliance or HITECH compliance while performing healthcare app testing.
- Identifying problems early on in the lifecycle: API testing tools allow continuous testing which allows QA engineers and developers to spot defects and bugs earlier in the development process.
- Integration with third party services: Third-party integration can enhance your application’s features, but it only takes one slow API call from a third-party provider to decelerate your entire software application.
- To enable mobile usage, it is a must-have: Mobile platforms rely upon API data retrieval to provide seamless and smooth experiences within the healthcare app.
- Secure patient and organizational data. APIs are often required for the storage and retrieval of protected health information (PHI), such as account details and identity data, and payment information.
Increase the coverage of your test cycle
It’s important to reduce delays between GUI testing and development. You can only test the core functionality and code of an application to get a good evaluation of overall build quality. This early indication will reveal the type of problems that may arise once you enter GUI. These problems can be more difficult to resolve later on in the QA process.
API testing is a time-consuming and expensive process that produces the best results when it is combined with the development work of your engineer. The API testing of healthcare software applications is a rigorous process that a healthcare app must go through. This gives you an advantage in the software release cycle.
Save Resources
Your engineers can focus on high-priority and high-value areas by following automated testing best practices using API testing tools. Instead of being tasked with tedious tasks like the manual entry of data to mount multiple tests and staging repetitive executions, they are now free to focus on more important areas. automated API Testing provides the speedy healthcare app testing that is needed to stay competitive in today’s DevOps era.
These savings can be felt when bulk testing is performed, such as load, functional and reliability testing. Your QA team will see efficiency improvements once they have access to your core functionality. Automation allows engineers to validate existing features and also verify new code, greatly improving your regression cycles. Similar improvements will be realized once you begin testing and creating reports on various formats and platforms.
You’ll save time and money by spending less time on manual testing the GUI phase.
Faster and more efficient
This simple example illustrates the time that API testing will save you. The process of polling each element on a webpage is time-consuming because GUI requires that it be done. This is the difference between the testing of core functionality and parallel execution.
This is a significant difference. You can see the API advantage when you consider the complexity of your healthcare app, which will eventually need to handle massive amounts of patient information each day.
We are aware of the time constraints that release cycles bring, and the temptation to skim API testing. API testing is essential if your application is to work properly and to be reliable. This allows you to get closer to your application’s core. This allows you to ensure that your healthcare app is solid before you move on to the final user capabilities. It’s essential in a field that is so affected by compliance and security issues.
How to test an API
API testing does not use standard inputs or outputs. Instead, a QA tester sends out a request to the API, gets an output, and records the response. You can expect the following types of output when you perform API testing for your healthcare app:
- Different types of data
- Status: Pass or fail
- Call another API or an event
How to do API Testing
Now that you know what API testing is and how it works, you can learn how to perform API testing in healthcare software applications. These QA processes can be added to your software testing process with the help of the right API testing tools.
- Functionality Testing: Is the API working and performing as expected?
- Reliability testing: Can the API consistently be connected to and produce consistent results?
- Security Testing: Has the API defined security requirements?
- Load testing: Can the API handle large numbers of calls?
- Proficiency Test: Is the API able to increase developers’ abilities?
- Negative testing: What happens when the API receives incompatible or incorrect inputs?
- Creativity Test: Does the API work in non-standard situations?
Are you unsure of how to apply API testing for your healthcare app? Development? A professional QA partner such as aisle-won is a good choice. Our healthcare app testing specialists are experts in API Testing in Healthcare Software Applications and can help guide your team to best practices in healthcare software testing.