Implementation Cycle

Testing has been considered one of the most important aspects of the health information system life cycle. Much focus is placed on ensuring testing is completed and beneficial. What makes testing so important? Please provide SCHOLARLY work to back up your thoughts. The use of APA format is a must to be considered for credit.

ANSWER

Testing in Health Information System Life Cycle

The Health Information System life cycle is a problem-solving framework that entails cycling and logical steps that ensures that required standards are met. The phases include planning, system analysis, design, testing, implementation, and maintenance (Davis, 2019). Testing is the most crucial phase of the system life cycle since it ensures the health information system works correctly. The health information system is deployed in the testing environment, where the testing team begins testing the whole system’s functionality.

A function and stable health information system is vital for gathering and producing quality data to update all the significant interested party to allow reviewing, planning, and checking overall quality assurance and enhancement of all health system aspects. Therefore, the health information system has to be tested to determine if it effectively integrates data collection and reporting. The testing phase involves technical testing, integration and unit testing, system testing, performance testing, and system acceptance testing to verify the whole system is working according to the requirements. For instance, unit testing takes one unit of software source code and tests whether they have complied with specific needs. Performance testing determines how the health information system performs in terms of stability and responsiveness under a specific workload.

The testing phase determines whether the health information system is ready for implementation. At this stage, the main focus is on discovery and investigation, where the developers can determine whether the health information system meets the client’s needs (Davis, 2019). At this stage, the application of the health information system is tested to ensure that it is functioning well. The performance tests are used to reduce any lags and hang in processing. The testing phase helps lower the number of glitches and bugs that users experience. The testing phase continues until the health information system is stable, bug-free, and working according to the system objectives.

References

Davis, W. S. (2019). The systems development life cycle. In The Information System Consultant’s Handbook (pp. 3-9). CRC Press.