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22 March 2023: With the rise of staffing challenges, CEO of SureTest, Laura O’Toole shares their fully managed solution that completely alleviates the burden for their clients. With their library of 2,500 EHR workflows, SureTest was built to help manage the 20-40,000 hours a year health systems were spending on EHR testing and the surrounding and integrated third party applications. Saving you time with their quick implementations, money with their speedy ROI delivery, and FtE positions, their solution is a phenomenal way to maintain testing and minimize risk. Check out their booth, number 812, to see a full demo of the solution as well as hear from active clients on how they’ve utilized this solution.

Key Points:

  • Many SureTest employees obtain Epic certifications
  • Built EHR library on Eggplant that can implement new workflows 4-5 times faster, delivering ROI within the year
  • SureTest is branching into enterprise solutions, saving the equivalent of 8-12 FtE positions with their solution
  • 80-85% of testing becomes automated

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Transcript

This transcription is provided by artificial intelligence. We believe in technology but understand that even the smartest robots can sometimes get speech recognition wrong.

Today on This Week Health.

  (Intro) 📍 A lot of people buy automation tools that are off the shelf and work to get them developed, but then it's like painting the flipping Golden Gate bridge, right?

Maintaining it and keeping it is evergreen a real challenge. And that's the problem that we solve.  📍

Welcome to this Week Health. This is a conference campaign where we chat with our partners about the exciting initiatives they have going on in healthcare.

ViVE 2023 is coming up in Nashville, and we want to give you the opportunity to know some of the great solutions that you are going to be seeing at the conference and how you can find them. So, let's get right into it. Today we're joined by Laura O'Toole, c e o of Sure Test.

Laura, welcome to the show.

Hi, bill. Great to see you as always,

great to see you as well. I'm looking forward to this conversation. We're gonna. deep into automation. And I'm excited about this cause I've talked to some of your clients and I've looked at some of the things that you have done in this space. It's really exciting, the things that SureTest enables for healthcare and for healthcare IT organizations.

What are some of the things you're gonna be talking about at ViVE?

So we're really excited about ViVE this year, bill. We're gonna have a booth down on the floor. We'll have our solution in the booth so that folks can come by and see a full demo of the solution. We'll be there with our partner, eggplant Keysite.

So we're delighted that they're gonna be joining us down on the floor this year. And we're really excited to have many of our clients actually active clients that will be stopping by and available to talk to folks that may be interested in what the SureTest solution can do for their teams.

So what can it do?

You and I have talked about the numbers we've talked about automation of this testing. How much testing does a healthcare organization typically do around the applications that you serve?

Yeah, so SureTest was purpose-built to help our clients take care of the approximately 20, sometimes up to 40,000 hours a year that a good size and large size health system is spending on primarily their E H R testing and all the surround and integrated third party applications.

So it's an inordinate amount of time at a time when healthcare doesn't have time and they're struggling with staffing challenges. What Sure Test does as a full managed solution is it completely alleviates that burden for our clients. We were purpose built. We spent a lot of time and energy and money with a couple of pilot clients to build out a large library of automation.

We have about 2,500. EHR workflows in our library, and what that does is it jumpstarts the automation for our clients. A lot of people buy automation tools or have tools that are off the shelf and they work to get them developed, but then it's like painting the, the flipping Golden Gate bridge, right?

Maintaining it and keeping it is evergreen, and then that continual development. Is a real challenge. And that's the problem that we solve. We fix fit, we're confident in our delivery, and we leverage that library to really jumpstart our clients' initiatives for their own libraries of automation.

So, Laura, 2,500 workflows.

But when I think about it every health system's gonna say, but I'm different. So can you just drop your stuff in here? So what does the process look like and how do they leverage the work that you've already done?

So one of the things that we've done, I think that's our secret sauce, is not only are our developers very well versed in automation and developing those tools, but they grew up as domain experts, primarily in Epic and Cerner.

So many of our folks held multiple Epic certifications, so they're able to see through the muck really quickly to the other side. And as a part of that, we built out a framework that's very plug and play. I liken it to like Lincoln Logs or Legos, when you were a kid. So what we do is when we record a new client's workflows, we are able to take that artifact and bump it up against our library and find the commonalities, and then use that as Lincoln Logs to now create their library.

And it allows us to do it, four to five. Faster than they can do it themselves based on the components and the framework of the library that we've built. So it's a real speed to value delivering ROI within the first year.

It's interesting you did talk to not one of your clients, but somebody else who's built out a testing automation platform, and it's actually built on eggplant.

You're built on eggplant. They're built on eggplant. . And they were very proud of what they had built, but then they said, yeah, but you know what? Oh my gosh, just the ongoing maintenance of this thing is killing me. It's the same thing as developing an application. You have to continually look at the scripts.

You have to continually modify 'em, update them. And keep them. And even that, when I talked to 'em about your platform, they were sitting there going, yeah, that makes more sense for us.

Yeah, I think that there's so many tools out there and we did extensive research on the tools that are out there and we're kind of tool agnostic.

We built the EHR library front on eggplant because it is the only technology that we have found that is able to handle the complexities of the patient journey. Most automation tools do image capture or, screen scraping. Alone. This uses OCR technology, so the flexibility within the tool is significantly different than anything that we've found on the markets.

There are other tools that we use. If we're doing web and mobile testing or we're doing some interface testing, you can use more rote automation. But in terms of the complexity, if you think about the number of places a patient can journey through a health system to be able to have that flexibility that's the only way that you can maintain it, is by building a framework that you can very easily when you update one component.

It can update, a whole host of components and most people don't build their frameworks that way. I think because we have the domain expertise to really understand the E H R workflow, we were very purpose driven in how we built our framework to be able to solve that problem for our clients.

So when they swing by, they're gonna see your tool and they're gonna be able to interact with it and whatnot.

But you've moved beyond just epic and Cerner at this point, and you're moving into other areas of testing as well.

Yeah, so our initial clients that have had great success leveraging our library and our managed solution for the E H R have now come to us and said, I'm moving down the enterprise journey.

Primarily Workday and Infor are the two that we have been asked to look to build out libraries to help them on their enterprise platform. So that's really a next box opportunity for us that we're working with a couple clients on right now

and that gets that platform thinking that we've been talking to CIOs about for years.

It's, that's right. This becomes your automation testing platform and you just keep looking at whatever's next down the road.

Yep. This is an enterprise tool and it can handle enterprise problems and for us the key is to give the time and the money back to our clients and we've seen our clients be able to save.

The equivalent of 8, 9, 10, 11, 12 F t E positions with this solution, now everybody's doing something differently. Some people are using those to do more strategic projects. We've had, client or two eliminate teams or move those folks to other areas that would give them additional leverage ability.

But, at a time where, Our clients are spending so much money on clinical resources and traveling nurses and traveling clinicians and trying to fill the gap to serve their clinical needs. This is an opportunity for them to save time and money and quite frankly, reduce significant risk because you could never test as much as this solution is testing in a rigorous way continual way.

Some of these test scripts are, eight days long, all the way through the whole revenue cycle. You just can't do that with manual intent.

So does it get rid of about 80% or how much of the testing becomes automated?

Yep. Our goal is about, 80 to 85%.

Most of our clients are seeing right around the 80% mark, cuz there's some things that we would recommend you don't automate just because you don't test them enough. It just doesn't make sense. It's not worth the bang for the buck. But about 80% Completely eliminate that manual testing both at the unit level and the integrated testing level for the E H R.

And, we're starting to see some clients now take upgrades more often. You've, you saw this big move where, like Epic move to four upgrades a year. It's like constant. Just by the time you're getting done with one, you're onto the next one, so they move to twice a year. This gives you the opportunity to take those four upgrades a year and be able to leverage the great functionality that's coming out sooner,

and organizations that are forced to do cuts because of financial considerations.

Right now, this is one of those areas where you can replace some of that with technology. I know that you and I were in a room where one of those CIOs was talking about , he just had to cut his team and he is just gonna do less testing. And that started a conversation.

What if you didn't have to do less testing?

Right, exactly. And what about the risk you're introducing by doing less testing? I mean, that's what scares me. You've gotta test these workflows in all the downstream systems. Too many impacts to not test.

Yep. Well, absolutely. So, SureTest, it's gonna be at Booth 812.

Yep. At the ViVE conference. Looking forward to that. Laura I also want to thank you for being a part of Captain's Cures for Childhood Cancer. We're doing a drive at the event, and you are one of three of the sponsors that have generously given towards that campaign. And we're looking forward to people taking their picture with Captain at the event.

We're going to be donating a dollar for everybody who is in the picture. So if you get a 50 of your friends in the picture with Captain, that'll be $50 towards Alex's Lemonade Stand. We really appreciate your partnership in doing that.

Yeah, well, I'm excited. I think we should try to do that picture.

We're doing a pretty special and intimate kind of vintage wine and charcuterie tasting event. Back when Covid hit Bill. It was really hard to connect with clients and you wanna respect clients time, nobody wanted to go out to dinner. So we started doing these kind of virtual wine tasting events and we have this amazing sommelier.

He's just a cool guy. So an appreciation for our clients and some prospects. We're having a really nice event and I hope that you and Holly and Captain. Come by that and check it out. And that'd be a great place to have a photo. I love that dog, by the way, I gotta meet him. He's so cute.

He is. If anyone's wondering captain is a service dog and is one of the best trained dogs I've ever come across. He's amazing. So looking forward to that. I hope everyone is excited as I am to get together at ViVE. Definitely visit the SureT est booth.

Booth 812. Stop by, talk to Laura, talk to the team and let them know that you heard about it here. We really want to thank all of you for listening. That's all for now.

(Main) I love the chance to have these conversations. I think If I were a CIO today, I would have every team member listen to a show like this one. I believe it's conference level value every week. If you wanna support this week health, tell someone about our channels that would really benefit us. We have a mission of getting our content into as many hands as possible, and if you're listening to it, hopefully you find value and if you could tell somebody else about it, it helps us to achieve our mission. We have two channels. We have the conference channel, which you're listening. And this week, health Newsroom. Check them out today. You can find them wherever you listen to podcasts. Apple, Google, overcast. You get the picture. We are everywhere. We wanna thank our keynote partners, CDW, Rubrik, Sectra and Trellix, who invest in 📍 our mission to develop the next generation of health leaders. Thanks for listening. That's all for now.

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