Headquartered in Grand Junction on the western edge of Colorado, Rocky Mountain Health Plans (RMHP) is part of an innovative healthcare community working to create accountable care and patients. As part of this, RMHP serves as the state’s Region 1 Medicaid Accountable Care Collaborative. This involves collecting, tracking and analyzing data from participants in 22 countries.
When Frank Orr joined RMHP in 2014 as CIO, the IT department was developing an enterprise data hub and Orr needed to introduce QA processes. Having been with a number of healthcare companies in the past, Orr understood the high level of security required around patient data. RMHP had always kept access to this data internal, but Orr wanted to bring in an offshore partner with whom he worked before – Coherent Solutions. He had a high opinion of their Quality Assurance practice.
Getting to the heart of a QA issue
Orr wanted to ensure high-quality data as the hub was being developed by introducing automated testing. While developers tested their own code manually, the bulk of testing ended up at the user level. This came late in the process and frustrated users who expected a better initial product.
Orr and the Coherent QA team found they needed to look upstream to understand why these problems persisted. They found that developers were being given just enough detail on their assignments to create and test their own code, but they needed visibility into the bigger picture. In order to create robust use cases, the QA team needed more information. So Coherent asked to see the story cards before development began. In doing this the development, as well as the QA team, got more carefully crafted requirements, which in turn assured better working code downstream.
