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Executive Interview: Why Healthcare Systems Are Abandoning Manual Testing with Mark Scruggs

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I'm Bill Russell, creator of this Week Health, where our mission is to transform healthcare, one connection at a time. This is an executive interview

quick powerful Conversations with Leaders Driving Change. So let's get started.

MarkScruggs: Thanks, bill. It's great to be here with you.

Bill Russell: You know, it's interesting.

We've been having some meetings. We did a city tour dinners in Seattle, in Portland Miami. And uh, we did a, a, a summit this past weekend. And I joke by saying maybe not the sexiest company, but one of the hottest because I think that's where people are focused right now. They're focused on operational capabilities and especially those that can deliver. Real ROI quickly, and I think it's one of the reasons that when you guys are in the room and have conversations, people go, oh wait, that's a very real problem. So give us a little background on the problem that you guys solve in healthcare, and we can jump off from there.

We probably have a number of now third party applications that we've built testing for. Over 25 of those we're getting ready to kick off our first UKG project and we've got a number of clients looking at, other ERP solutions that they wanna automate that, those testing processes.

So, you know, this is speaking of the ROI, most of our clients when we do RI studies, they don't really realize how much time they spend on testing until they really kinda sit down to analyze it. We've done probably 30 plus ROI studies now, and most of our clients are spending. North of 20,000 hours manually testing these various systems across monthly UPG updates, those big quarterly.

So they can spend that on, higher value tasks around the hospital.

Bill Russell: It's interesting because this is this is really testing as a service. I mean, so this is a managed service for people and it does lift a lot of that burden off of that off of that team. But the other thing that as a service really does is it spreads knowledge across an industry. So you're able to look I would assume that you're able to look at some workflows and say. Hey, you know what? There might be a better way to do this. We're seeing an optimal way to do this. Are you able to spread that kind of knowledge across the industry? I. I.

MarkScruggs: We are in fact for some of our clients that are implementing either new modules within their EHR we're able to show them some of the best practices that we have within our library. Of course, we did de-identify those. We had a client just the other day implement Epic's new pharmacy module and we were able to extract some of the willow workflows that we had built for other clients.

So we were able to share that knowledge not just from a workflow standpoint and kind of processes, but. Also just from a, you know, testing and upgrade expectations. You know, when epic went from their hyperspace to hyperdrive upgrades we able to kind of modify. And look at some of the workflows that were being impacted and then share with other clients that were kind of doing that downstream and later in the process.

Some of the things that we had seen with earlier clients, earlier adopters so able to share that knowledge across client base to, you know, really give them an indication of what they could expect or should expect with some of those upgrades.

It's not like, I mean, once people start doing this, it's not like they're saying no, we want testing back.

The solution's very sticky. The renewal rate is very high. No one wants to go back to doing manual testing once they see the benefits and the ROI of the automation. And it is a true managed service. We've been told by KLAS who would like to build a class and other market studies that we are the only provider that does this as a true turnkey managed service.

Bill Russell: I'm gonna take this a little different direction now from a product development standpoint. I'm curious how you're thinking about ai. it's interesting the when we talk about AI in a lot of cases, a lot of people think of the generative models and, the non-deterministic models, but there's a lot of different AI out there.

I'm curious, as you're looking at the evolution and where things are going, how do you think AI is going to change the space that you guys are in?

MarkScruggs: So I'll take that answer maybe a couple different directions. One is we don't believe that when you're testing like we are the patient journey over multiple days. Multiple applications within the EHR that's ever gonna be replaced by AI. We think that there has to be some kinda logic built into the testing processes, especially when you're testing across multiple different applications.

The first one is just scoping out the work, right? We get these test databases from clients, these manual test cases, and just evaluating the number of workflows and the number of. Applications within those workflows that we need to build out automation for is just basically scoping that body of work.

And we call that our our test analyzer to or script analyzer to actually go out and analyze the scripts using AI to just evaluate you know, what the initial scope is that we think we have to tackle.

And then the testing processes. Along with the testing, there's certainly some AI components that we can use to make our testing more resilient.

Used to compliment the automation leveraging ai, and those are some investments that we're making in 2026.

MarkScruggs: I do love to drink wine bill. You're right. So I had a very memorable wine. And I think wine's all about memories, right? It's not just the wine you drink, but it's the people you're drinking it with. And I think that kind of builds a connection community. But we had bring your Best Bottle Night the other night, and I'm sad to say mine was not voted the best bottle.

Bill Russell: and I were part of a group that went to Burns. It was the only time I've been to Burns Steakhouse in And we got to walk through the the wine cellar that night. I don't think I've ever seen a wine cellar quite like that. That was like a walk into history though.

The conversations we were having, the same things. We, we got to see Is, is that one of the places that you would highly recommend people put on their list if they're going to the Tampa area for

MarkScruggs: It would be at the top of my list. And so yeah they're, that's a very special story. Burns, laer, you know, start acquiring wine back. You know, 40, 50 years ago would go do these wine tastings in Europe and bring back wine by the shipping container. They have the largest collection of wine in the world.

I think they're approaching a million bottles. They have the largest number of labels in their collection. I think you remember the wine list was 120 pages, I believe. And that wine cellar we walked through on premises that night is I think one of 10 of their cellars around the Tampa area.

So it's a special place to go.

And they'd open it up and go, oh my gosh. I can, could you imagine that, that must've been amazing.

Bill Russell: Well, from now on we will do a wine review every time we we get together on the

MarkScruggs: That sounds great.

Bill Russell: Mark, really appreciate your time and look forward to seeing you sometime soon. I. I.

MarkScruggs: Thanks Bill. Let's make that happen. I.

Thanks for joining us for this executive interview with me, bill Russell. Every healthcare leader needs a community they can lean on and learn from. Subscribe at this week, health.com/subscribe and share this conversation with your team. Together we're transforming healthcare.

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