Over the past few years, a growing number of healthcare providers have started using websites and mobile apps to effectively collaborate with partners and patient support services and communicate more effectively with patients in a timely manner. All this is made possible by APIs for healthcare companies.
Healthcare APIs help power patient applications that create new ways for healthcare providers to connect with their patients through web, social and mobile portals. Additionally, by developing internal APIs, healthcare providers can offer their partners new tools to streamline operations and improve quality of care. In healthcare, where quick access to the right information is critical to making the right decisions, having a well-tested API strategy is of the utmost importance.
What is a Healthcare Application?
An application in the healthcare industry is an application program designed to provide health-related services for portable devices including smartphones and tablets. Since the healthcare application is accessible to both patients and healthcare providers at home and on the go, these healthcare software applications are often categorized as mobile health (mHealth) software applications and tele-health applications.
What is API Testing?
API testing is a type of software testing designed to validate application programming interfaces, or APIs. API testing aims to review the functionality, performance, reliability and security of these programming interfaces, often with the help of API testing tools. API Tester focus on the business logic layer of the software architecture rather than the look and feel of the user interface.
Why is Healthcare API Testing So Important?
API testing is especially important for healthcare application development, as applications must meet complex usability, security, and compliance requirements. In fact, many QA teams structure their software testing strategies for HIPAA and HITECH compliance when performing healthcare application testing. For healthcare application development, API testing is essential when:
Identify issues early in the lifecycle: API testing tools support continuous testing, allowing QA engineers to catch defects and errors early in the development cycle.
Integration with third-party services: Your application’s functionality is enhanced by third-party integration, but all it takes is one slow API call to a third-party service to slow down your entire software application.
Must-Have Mobile Enablement: Mobile platforms rely on API data retrieval to run smoothly and seamlessly within a healthcare application.
Securing patient and organizational data: Protected health information (PHI), including health records, account details, identifying information, and payment information, often requires APIs for storage and retrieval.