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Solution Showcase: The Freeing Power of Testing Automation with Phillip Furukawa and Chris Paravate

Continuous testing is critical and getting it right saves lives. Discover the future of healthcare IT automation with SureTest. Visit ThisWeekHealth. com slash SureTest today and elevate your healthcare system's performance.

I am Bill Russell, creator of this Week Health, where our mission is to transform healthcare, one connection at a time. Welcome to today's solutions showcase where we spotlight innovations, making real impact in health systems. Let's take a look at what's working today.

chris: Thank you.

Phillip Furukawa: Yeah. Thank you, bill. Good morning.

Bill Russell: We're going to have a, a discussion today about a, a problem set. I think a lot of organizations are, are struggling with. Uh, but before we get there, Chris, I, I'd love for those who aren't familiar with Northeast Georgia Health System, give us a, a, a quick picture of the organization.

Size, scope, uh, your IT environment.

chris: So just over a thousand beds, five hospitals, about a hundred ambulatory locations. We serve all of, uh, northeastern region of Georgia, everywhere from Athens to Alpharetta and all the way up to North Carolina. Uh, we are a, uh, digital, most wired, low 10 health system. So, uh, pretty progressive on adoption of technology.

Bill Russell: So, uh, CIO since, uh, 2014,

chris: Yeah.

Bill Russell: Epic Go Live was followed that pretty closely after that, right?

Bill Russell: Well, and that, that is one of your core tenets, right? As A-C-I-O-I mean, we, we've interviewed before and you're like, look, if. If it can be done on that platform, we're going to do it on that platform.

Bill Russell: Well, because of the scale of your Epic implementation, the, the Epic upgrade cycle, that's, that's like a real thing. And uh, it required a fair amount of testing every time that that came through. Uh, give, give us, walk us through what a typical. upgrade cycle required from your team, uh, maybe before SureTest, and then we'll, we'll get into, uh, what it, what, uh, problem you solved and, and what it looks like now.

chris: So like most of us who started doing integrated test. We started with manila folders and we passed testing scripts around, uh, I would say for our upgrades that wasn't too far behind, right? Uh, the challenge with an upgrade is you are reading all these, you know, elaborate release notes. Uh, and, and while Epic has provided some, some tools and capabilities in there, um, it's really hard then to inject those into your test scripts.

So I've got, uh, for example, CDI, uh, queries and, uh, you know, CDI reminders. Um, I can't implement that capability until, uh, may when we do a double upgrade. So we're going to revisit that. We're going to look at it and, and, and probably we're going to end up moving to quarterly.

Bill Russell: With manual testing. I can't imagine without quarterly.

So these things all kind of fit together. SureTest has been a, a capability that we invested in. Uh, and I'll tell you, my team, you know, they, they were very skeptical. Uh, they were like, uh, I'm going to, you know, build these scripts and how's that going to happen?

Bill Russell: This, we've been doing this for years, Chris.

chris: Well, and, and we test, I mean, we test extraordinary.

How do I, how do I right fit this and, and what level of risk do I wanna take in those upgrades? Uh, you know, so for us, uh, you know, that testing automation is not just for the upgrades, it's for testing, uh, things that may have actually even been introduced into the environment, uh, through a change management process that, that, um.

And, uh, so that's a, you know, the, all these things are, you know, competing. And, and so testing automation for us, uh, is a really big deal, uh, because it, frankly, it frees up, frees up bodies to do the work.

Bill Russell: I'm, I'm going to come back to that in a minute. I wanna pull Phillip into the conversation. Uh, when, when an organization like Uh, comes to SureTest, how, what does it look like? What does the implementation look like? What does it look like to, take what is an existing, manual process that I, I mean, I joke that you know, hey, we've been doing this for years, but. have been doing this for years. This is a known process. People, um, you know, good, bad or indifferent, they've been doing this, testing this way. What does it look like to bring them on board? And then what are some of the things you find as you sort of move through that process?

And to Chris's point. Northeast Georgia has a, you know, highly complex environment and their team was doing a phenomenal job of testing. beauty in automation is it's going to perform exactly as we, you know, we develop it to perform and sometimes we kinda joke, computers are dumb in this sense. They're going to do exactly what it's, we tell 'em to do nothing outside of that. and, um, when you look at, you know, a way that our solution is architected, it's, it's different and intentionally. So from your traditional RPA and, and taking a, you know, if then, and that approach. We truly emulate what the end users are doing and the actions that they're taking. So we mirror that level of quality, but we're in, we're increasing the level of frequency in which your scripts are being run and the rigor that's associated with them.

Bill Russell: Do, do you have ongoing testing or is this just, you know, once a quarter or Once, once every six months that you're doing this kind of testing?

Phillip Furukawa: So yeah, when you go to a family practice, right, and you go see your, your, um, your family doctor, uh, that's a one day script.

That's easy. We run that, you know, every day if it's a seven day inpatient surgery script, right? We can't run that every day, but we're going to run it maybe once every eight days. So we run those scripts on a schedule that is most appropriate for that script. But we do turn the entire library over at a minimum once a month.

So you are getting the benefit of regression testing.

Bill Russell: What does it look like when you're the first time you come in? do you guys come in, do at the elbow with the testers and sort of pick up their scripts? Or do you guys bring in a a series of scripts that they pick and choose from?

I mean, 'cause each environment's a little different.

Bill Russell: You know, it, it's, uh, Chris, the fact that you're talking about quarterly updates speaks to, uh, some of the things that SureTest talks about in their, uh, in their literature. But I, I, I, I sort of wanna stress test some of these things. SureTest talks about eliminating up to 80% of the manual testing. Did did that hold true at, uh, Northeast Georgia?

chris: Yeah, you know, I just pulled the, the data on this. I'm glad you asked me. So first of all, um, we've seen a 98% reduction in, in testing time allocated humans, touching, doing testing, 98%, which has far exceeded my expectations. We survey our teams though about the testing and how they feel about testing and what's their confidence level.

And we believe it's because we're doing this constant, uh, regression testing and we're, we're able to really make sure. Um, that things are built correctly and, uh, we're seeing issues being addressed more proactively in our, in our overall production environment. So I would tell you it has exceeded, we have almost 500 scripts, uh, in place is what the, what the latest number is.

Uh, we're getting probably between seven and 10 FTEs of savings out of that. Um, and, and you know, frankly, that's not seven or 10 FTEs I've eliminated. Those are seven to 10 FTEs that I've, I've moved into enhancements or projects or other activities.

Bill Russell: Yeah, I mean, like you talked about earlier, I mean, the pace at which things are coming out of Verona right now are pretty fast and furious, and, and those people were doing sort of double duty, right?

chris: Yeah.

Bill Russell: they

Probably the biggest challenge of being an Epic customer, even when I was at at Children's Healthcare of Atlanta, is that Epic's always cranking out these things, but you don't have the capacity to actually implement that incremental functionality, right? So now I'm, I'm reallocating that time, and that's where people enjoy, right?

I mean. I'm not allowed to do testing 'cause I like to go off and do whatever I want and just kind of click on stuff and break it. Um, so I've, I've been banished from, from testing, uh, but

Bill Russell: give me the keys to the data center. I wasn't allowed in the data center.

And you know, if I, if I said, uh, we're not going to do that anymore. They, uh, it'd be a mutiny, right? I mean, we, this is just part of our, our portfolio now.

Phillip Furukawa: Most organizations, their, their team is operating at capacity or over capacity, and so how do you give them time back to, you know, to Chris's point, empower them to practice at the top of their license.

That really improves their, their experience as an employee. Um, they get to focus on things that are really going to move the needle for the organization. You know, the, the optimizations, the configurations that. are going to drive that utilization, help drive some of that gold stars, you know, initiative that you're probably looking at.

And there's, you know, this is well known across to all the organizations too. There's no shortage of projects that are in the backlog. And so what can you get to, you know, that you, you previously were not able to get to and accomplish with anywhere from 17 to 30,000 hours back annually. And so there's, um, there's a lot of value there in that time savings of being able to reallocate it.

chris: I just sat down with our CEO last week and went through our Epic executive packet, and he asked me all the reasons why we had to. Everything implemented. Uh, freeing up those resources to get after that is, is the number one reason. Uh, and, you know, some organizations will say, well, we're risk tolerant and, you know, we'll do a bad upgrade, have a few issues with an upgrade, and, uh, you'll find out how intolerant healthcare is too.

Bill Russell: Hello Chris. I wanna thank you for your time. This is, uh, is, uh, exciting stuff. I mean, we're entering a time where, um, the velocity, uh, not only from Verona, but. Just across the board, the amount of things we're being asked to do is, uh, feels to be only increasing and to be able to free up resources to, handle those kinds of things that are higher level things.

It seems like, uh, a, a real priority for many, healthcare organizations today. So I appreciate, uh, the work you're doing, Chris, appreciate the work you're doing Phillip as well. Thanks for your time.

Phillip Furukawa: Thanks Chris. Appreciate you guys.

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