VZVZ Streamlines Strict Acceptance Tests for Healthcare Industry With Continuous Testing Solutions

The Challenge

VZVZ is a non-profit organization, founded by healthcare professionals and funded by health insurance companies to be responsible for the exchange of medical data of connected health care professionals in the Netherlands as is shown in the figure below. Medical data is transferred via the LSP, the National Exchange Point, a vital part of the Dutch national healthcare infrastructure. VZVZ’s role is to ensure a sound, secure, and reliable operation of the LSP.

To ensure correct connectivity between healthcare information systems from care providers to the LSP, VZVZ needed an acceptance test environment. They also wanted to connect new healthcare providers to the LSP in order to broaden the use of the LSP while also improving patient safety and wellbeing. Achieving this goal would mean that an increasing number of information systems for healthcare providers would be connected to the LSP. To enable this, the acceptance environment had to be changed.

The Approach

In a thorough market assessment, VZVZ examined proprietary and open source products. They considered multiple technical and security criteria. VZVZ also looked at the availability of local services and support. Finally, it took pricing and cost-effectiveness into consideration. This resulted in the introduction of Parasoft’s continuous testing solution.

This solution was chosen, for several reasons, including the ability to:

• Simulate the messaging of medical data via the LSP.
• Test the functionality of smart card technology (UZI cards), used for health care professionals to access the LSP.
• Provide technicians to assist VZVZ Operations to simulate and test the exchange of messaging via the LSP on the acceptance environment

With the Parasoft solution, VZVZ gets a highly adaptable framework for building simulators of healthcare providers. These simulators are configured to work together, storing state-based data to support complex test scenarios. Using this technology, VZVZ is able to monitor traffic coming from and going to LSP continuously, change test data when needed, and adapt the simulation when new versions of service definitions are released.

The technology from Parasoft is normally used to support teams in their agile way of working by making them independent of third parties. At VZVZ, this technology is taken a step further: it is used to create a certification platform by simulating other parties within an LSP network.

The Results

VZVZ is now able to process modified or new suppliers through the same strict acceptance test without needing the availability of other dependent parties. It is simply a matter of simulating the required scenarios. This helps VZVZ keep the quality of structured information exchange in the healthcare at the required level which is a constant challenge.

The changes made within the certification environment resulted in supporting testing throughout the entire chain to ensure that the exchange of medical information/data was not disrupted on a national scale and that new developments could be tested and implemented faster.

The positive results of the LSP project made VZVZ decide to use Parasoft for their next challenge: How to ensure the correct roll-out of a new peer-to-peer network for personal medical data exchange on a national scale.

“Highly-complex message exchange and application integrations are becoming increasingly important for VZVZ and its members. By using Parasoft technologies, testing can now be done on all connected systems instead of testing each system separately.”

—Emiel den Oude, XIS Testcoordinator, VZVZ Test Team