Over the past several years, healthcare organizations have grown increasingly dependent on digital care applications. And, as applications have grown in popularity for their ability to provide telehealth services, performance testing has become more important than ever before. Failing to confirm your applications are always meeting performance standards can lead to a decrease in patient satisfaction, reduce productivity and even put your patients’ health at risk.
Validate your system performance during peak traffic with Cyara’s load testing solutions.
The healthcare industry is heavily regulated and monitored, so there are many factors that you must consider when developing patient experiences. Performance and load testing solutions are a necessary part of any effective CX strategy, allowing you to verify the stability, performance, and availability of the applications used throughout your organization.
You can verify your healthcare applications are always performing as intended by leveraging an automated load testing solution. Even during periods of heavy traffic, you can continue to serve your patients’ needs and get them the help they need during sensitive times.
What is load testing and performance testing?
Load testing is a type of software testing that evaluates how well a system performs under expected and peak user traffic conditions. Performance testing is the broader practice of assessing system responsiveness, stability, and scalability to verify applications meet required standards.
Since 2020, healthcare organizations have grown increasingly dependent on digital care applications. And, as applications have grown in popularity for their ability to provide telehealth services (remote healthcare delivery via digital platforms), performance testing has become more important than ever before. Failing to confirm your applications are always meeting performance standards can lead to a decrease in patient satisfaction, reduce productivity, and even put your patients’ health at risk.
Why is load testing important for healthcare?
• Confirms electronic health records (EHR) availability: EHR, digital versions of patient medical histories, must remain accessible during critical care moments.
• Prevents patient safety risks: System failures during emergencies can delay treatment and endanger lives.
• Maintains regulatory compliance: Healthcare organizations must meet strict standards like Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA), which governs patient data privacy.
• Supports telehealth scalability: Digital care platforms must handle sudden surges in patient demand.
• Protects sensitive patient data: Performance issues can create security vulnerabilities that bad actors may exploit.
Why is performance testing important for healthcare?
Performance testing validates that critical healthcare systems can handle high volumes of data and user activity without failures. This includes EHR and patient monitoring applications that medical staff depend on for treatment decisions.
Testing identifies potential issues before patients are impacted. By simulating peak traffic conditions, organizations can confirm their infrastructure is prepared for emergencies and high-demand periods.
For instance, consider a patient that goes to the emergency room after a car accident. During the accident, the patient sustained several injuries. The hospital uses an application that pulls up patient information for the doctors to reference. However, the application experiences an issue, leading to downtime. During this period, the doctor may be unable to properly treat the patient, as they need access to their medical history to begin treatment. In this example, the patient’s safety is at immediate risk, and the hospital’s inability to provide a seamless experience leads to increased frustration and reduces productivity.
But that’s just one brief example. With a load testing solution, you can:
Ensure patient safety
System defects directly impact patient outcomes. Defects can lead to longer waiting times and delays. In cases of critical treatment decisions, these issues can put your patients’ safety at risk.
Improve data security
Healthcare applications are prime targets for cyberattacks. Many healthcare applications store sensitive data which bad actors may target. It’s important to ensure your systems are secure, and that you can address vulnerabilities before an incident occurs.
Scale your infrastructure
Testing reveals your system’s true capacity limits. By conducting performance testing, you can assess how well your systems can handle peak interaction volume. In turn, the test results provide insights into how you can improve your systems and scale your CX offerings.
Address risks proactively
Identify bottlenecks before they cause patient-facing failures. Performance testing allows you to identify potential bottlenecks and other issues that may arise, so you can take proactive measures to address them before your patients are impacted.
Comply with regulatory standards
Verify HIPAA compliance and avoid costly penalties. Healthcare organizations are subject to strict regulations, such as HIPAA. With performance testing, you can verify compliance and identify any issues that may lead to costly penalties down the road.
When it comes to delivering quality experiences, performance testing is a must. All it takes is one issue within a single application to put your patients at risk or leave your organization subject to costly downtime and compliance penalties.
Manual vs. automated load testing for healthcare
Factor Manual testing Automated load testing
Time required Hours to test a fraction of infrastructure Thousands of interactions tested in minutes
Coverage Limited scenarios Comprehensive, real-world traffic simulation
Scalability Cannot replicate peak traffic conditions Simulates thousands of simultaneous users
Patient safety impact Higher risk of undetected issues Identifies defects before patient impact
Cost efficiency Resource-intensive, ongoing labor costs Reduced long-term testing expenses
Prepare for patient surges with load testing solutions
When periods of high traffic occur, such as during an emergency, it’s crucial to ensure that your systems will continue to perform flawlessly, without any delays or downtime. A system crash will keep you from serving your patients, leading to even more issues down the line. That’s where a load testing solution can help you prepare and reduce the risk of issues occurring in the live environment.
Load testing your applications and CX channels helps you determine how well your systems perform under peak load conditions. An automated testing solution can simulate real-world interactions, so you can identify bottlenecks and infrastructure capacity.
Manual testing processes are incredibly time-consuming and costly, requiring hours of time to test just a fraction of your infrastructure. By comparison, an automated load testing solution can fire off thousands of calls (or other interactions) to better understand how well your system performs at scale. These tests allow you to verify your infrastructure in a fraction of the time, so you can be confident that your system is prepared for even the heaviest traffic conditions, should the need arise.
Your patients rely on the ability to reach out and connect with you. Even the slightest delay can put their safety at risk, and it’s up to you to ensure that each and every interaction is seamless, even when thousands of patients are trying to contact you at once.
Elevate your CX with Cyara
As new technology and CX channels emerge, it’s become more important than ever to test and monitor your applications. And Cyara is here to help you assure quality through every stage of the CX development lifecycle.
Cyara Cruncher is our automated performance and load testing solution, designed to make sure your systems are always meeting your performance standards, even during your busiest. As part of the Cyara Agentic Platform, Cruncher simulates real-world traffic, allowing you to stress test your infrastructure and uncover any issues that may arise during periods of heavy traffic. If any defects emerge, you can proactively improve your system so that your patients will never have to experience a low-quality interaction.
Key Cyara Cruncher capabilities:
• Simulates real-world traffic: Replicates actual patient interaction patterns to test system performance authentically.
• Stress tests infrastructure: Pushes systems beyond normal capacity to identify breaking points.
• Identifies defects before patient impact: Uncovers issues in a controlled environment, not during live patient interactions.
• Tests individual architecture components: Isolates specific systems for targeted performance analysis.
• Finds and fixes breakpoints: Pinpoints exact failure thresholds so you can address them proactively.
• Confirms incremental improvements: Validates that system changes enhance overall CX performance.
There’s no telling when a disaster may occur or many patients need to contact your healthcare organization at the same time. By leveraging an automated load testing solution, you can begin setting your CX up for success and be confident that your systems will be able to perform even under periods of especially high traffic.
Contact us today to schedule a demo and see how you can benefit from Cyara’s load testing solutions or visit cyara.com to learn more.
Frequently Asked Questions
Load testing identifies system weaknesses before they cause failures during critical moments. By ensuring applications remain available during emergencies and peak demand, healthcare providers can deliver timely care without technology-related delays.
Priority systems include electronic health records (EHR), patient portals, telehealth platforms, appointment scheduling applications, and any patient-facing communication channels. These systems directly impact care delivery and patient experience.
Organizations should perform load testing before major system updates, during seasonal preparation (such as flu season), and regularly as part of ongoing quality assurance. Testing should also occur before anticipated high-traffic events.
Yes. Load testing helps verify that systems maintain security and availability standards required by HIPAA. It can identify vulnerabilities that might expose patient data during high-traffic conditions or system stress.
Load testing validates that critical systems like electronic health records and patient monitoring applications can handle high volumes of data and user activity without downtime, protecting patient safety and maintaining care quality.
Without load testing, system failures during high-traffic periods can cause delays in treatment, put patient safety at risk, reduce staff productivity, and expose organizations to costly compliance penalties.
Automated load testing can simulate thousands of real-world interactions in a fraction of the time manual testing requires, giving healthcare organizations a more thorough and efficient way to verify infrastructure performance at scale.
Yes, performance testing allows healthcare organizations to verify compliance with regulations such as HIPAA and identify vulnerabilities before they result in penalties or security incidents.
Load testing helps identify performance bottlenecks, infrastructure capacity limits, and system breakpoints that could cause downtime or degraded experiences during patient surges or emergencies.
Cyara Cruncher is an automated performance and load testing solution that simulates real-world traffic to stress test healthcare infrastructure, uncover defects, and confirm that systems meet performance standards even during peak demand.
Load testing should be performed regularly throughout the CX development lifecycle, particularly before major events, infrastructure changes, or new application releases, to ensure systems remain reliable under any traffic conditions.
