How one telehealth app scaled with healthcare software testing

Kassidy Kelley , Managing Editor

July 22nd, 2022

As the rapid digitization of healthcare grows, telehealth apps face a unique challenge in delivering continuous care on familiar devices.

The demand for telehealth apps only compounds the need for healthcare software testing to ensure a great user experience while scaling quickly and efficiently. Partnering with a crowdsourced testing vendor opens up immediate access to coverage for devices and locations, accelerated testing velocity, zero operational overhead, and increased ROI.

For Bright Health Group and their new mobile-first telehealth platform DocSquad, partnering with Testlio allowed for immediate scale and coverage so internal developers could get back to doing what they love – writing code.

Bright Health Group’s healthcare platform includes a suite of consumer and provider solutions, including DocSquad, a two-sided telehealth marketplace with a mix of virtual modalities, including real-time chat, audio, and video.

Scaling testing and coverage with on-demand testers

Our 2022 health and wellness industry report shows that health and wellness apps, like DocSquad, require frequent 2.5 releases/month on 60+ O/S and device combinations to compete in the market and garner high user ratings. Testlio clients’ high-performing apps use 36 testers on 65+ O/S combinations and release an average of 2.3x/month. 

In a competitive market that differentiates itself by iterating quickly, DocSquad knew that scaling healthcare software testing coverage was critical. Then, the major question was how. Recruit an internal QA team, or find a software testing partner? In the build vs. buy QA debate, companies without an existing QA team benefit from outsourcing to a QA partner to scale without the added stress of building and managing an in-house QA team.

Bright Health partnered with Tesltio, which provides a managed testing services team familiar with HIPAA and PHI compliance, plus a pool of over 40 on-demand crowdsourced testers. 

Types of outsourced testing and coverage:

• Full regression testing each sprint with complete device/OS/platform coverage

• Ad hoc testing for big feature test runs before shipping

• Localization testing with native Spanish speakers to improve the patient experience

• Virtual experience testing for two-sided modalities, including real-time chat, audio, and video

Get developers back to their roots

In addition to scaling coverage and release cadence, Bright Health struggled with scaling development under their system. In initial releases, DocSquad engineers performed complete regression tests on their code months before going to production. Okay, at first. But as the feature set expanded, managing regression each sprint meant losing valuable time to write code. 

Between Agile planning processes, demo, grooming, and retro, internal dev teams spent 10-30% of each sprint finding and fixing bugs and managing QA. Devs were pulled away from writing code, and in a competitive labor and engineering market, DocSquad was in danger of hemorrhaging money in lost dev time and valuable talent.

To depressurize the issue, Bright Health turned to Testlio to outsource a lot of the time-intensive healthcare software testing (i.e., complete regression testing, localization testing) to free developers to do what they love – writing and executing code. With a pool of over 40 on-demand testers, Bright Health can add features, locations, devices, etc., to new builds with the confidence of a fully backed QA team. 

Achieve 2x ROI and consistent release frequency

By outsourcing its QA team to Testlio, DocSquad harnesses the power of QA and QE resources, capabilities, and capacity to cover devices, languages, locations, networks, and frameworks.

DocSquad’s Testlio team now covers 65+ device/OS combinations across 13 locations with a 65+ tester pool size, on par with their competition’s average.

By offloading some of the QA burdens, internal developers were writing 10% more code within a month – critical for ensuring release frequencies. Partnering with Testlio also helped DocSquad maintain on-time production-ready releases every two weeks for an entire year. 

“Testlio has helped us buy back 10% of our development time. This means more story points per sprint and functionality to the business. We literally move feature-complete forward one day each sprint,” said Bright Health Senior Director and Mobile Architect Chad Pavliska.

With the help of a dedicated testing team, DocSquad’s platform will continue to mature while keeping a seamless, bug-free environment for continued care. The ultimate reward for the DocSquad team is a 4.9 end-user App Store rating and rapid patient and clinician adoption.