QA for Dental Practice Management Platform

Our client, MediCloud is a health-tech startup, recently acquired by Curaden, CH. They were developing a hub-and-spokes suite of services, based around a comprehensive Practice Management Platform for dental professionals. Their aim was to thus bridge some of the most important roles in dentistry through a network of dedicated solutions.

Their flagship product is the MediCloud platform – a 360-degree ecosystem of interconnected services, aimed at the various players in the dental care field:

  • PracticeDent, for dental care providers, practices and clinics of all sizes;
  • ProductDent, for dealers and manufacturers of all dental care related products;
  • PatientDent, for the patients of PracticeDent member practices;
  • AnalyticsDent, for business intelligence and management of larger chains of dental practices;
  • LabsDent, for dental technicians and laboratories.

Summary

A comprehensive dental practice management platform needed unit regression testing and overall integration testing before having its suite of interconnected products released. The Minds Technologies manual QA team completed a series of black-box tests in order to verify and validate the system against its specifications and overall expectations. The consequences from our tests and from our collaboration with our client’s development team led to optimization in all units, as well as overall improvement in their integration within the ecosystem. This brought to great improvements in the services, as well as in the user experience for all of the various types of users (roles) that the ecosystem serves (patients, care providers, administrators, accountants, suppliers, etc.).

Client:
Medicloud AG
Duration:
Ongoing
Project:
QA team for Dental Practice Management Platform

Challenges

Our client found it impossible to conduct in-depth integration testing of the entire ecosystem, since this required substantial resources. The very fact that multiple services had to be completely scalable and function just as well stand-alone as together in a network could be challenging enough, but the added burden of various roles, permission levels and dependencies turned the task into an intimidating ordeal. The added person-hours needed for the QA alone would be formidable overhead.

How We Helped

The task at hand was to ensure that the individual services functioned as intended, and that their interconnections was fully functional and reliable, forming a fluid ecosystem. Medi-Cloud relied on the Minds Technologies manual QA team for testing out the functionalities before releasing the services, as well as before adding new functionalities.

In order to test all facets of the platform, we had to develop sets of workflows (scenarios), which were intended to mimic various real-world situations and conditions; the services are supposed to be scalable and flexible enough to serve any size of business, as well as to keep up with all sorts of dynamics between various actors – including (but not limited to) dentists, hygienists, receptionists, administrators, accountants, state and private insurers, suppliers, patients, etc.

This required that our manual QA team devise various user stories (mimic various personas) and act out an exhaustive list of interactions – ranging from simple PracticeDent patient-doctor interactions, to complex multi-member-family situations with dependencies, engaging multiple dental care providers and extensive treatment plans, generating vast amounts of financial, insurance and medical documentation, as well as triggering cascades of in-house-inventory events, ultimately leading to the automated generation of purchase orders to pre-approved ProductDent-featured suppliers.

Following a test result analysis, the defect retesting phase for each of the test suite’s cases demonstrated excellent improvement in both unit and integration segments.

Results

After the unit testing of the individual services, they were optimized in means of performance, user experience and workflow. Practice- Dent and ProductDent received considerable UX overhauls of some specialized modules, such as the PracticeDent Calendar/Reception and Finances (mostly Cashbook and Remunerations) modules, and the ProductDent Inventory- and Order-tracking modules. The improvements and enhancements enhanced the performance of the services (especially in the case of the PracticeDent Calendar/Reception module), as well as their ease-of-use (with greatest effect in the Product- Dent Inventory-tracking module). Additionally, some of the scenarios uncovered inaccuracies that would have only surfaced in odd and uncommon situations, but could have led to further complications.

The pre-launch MediCloud ecosystem beta release to participating early-adopter customers showed that the extensive QA support offered by Minds Technologies had indeed been a worthwhile endeavor. It had greatly optimized system performance and load times, increased user comfort on all levels (even reducing the complexity of user on-boarding in several cases), and greatly reduced the expected financial overhead that would have arisen had the testing been done by an in-house team.