FRG customers have come to expect an AccuReports® that is reliable and accurate, and to satisfy the rigor and timeliness requirements of financial analysis, it must be. Therefore, our approach to testing and comprehensive service quality is multilayered. This article explains how we deliver AccuReports® with confidence.

A high quality online analytical report is one that both renders completely to the screen through magically commonplace world wide web technologies and accurately reflects the facts and figures the user orders. The two elements of this experience, the configuration of the web application and the preparation underlying data, require distinct developer skillsets. Beyond this, particularly in our case, ensuring the information is accurate requires an additional analysis of the underlying healthcare financial and medical economics data, a task which requires a different talent altogether. Therefore, to ensure the highest level of quality, we test AccuReports from these perspectives: application development, data processing, and analytic assessment.

Application Development

The FRG Application Development team develops, maintains, and updates the look and feel and functionality of AccuReports® by FRG. This team also implements client-specific customizations, such as dashboards and reports, that are required to support reconciliations and distribution of specialized data.

The process begins with specifications collection and thoughtful design. Then, the Application Development team creates prototype code and posts it to an experimental instance of AccuReports®. This instance remains deep within the FRG security infrastructure and segregated from the production application where the Quality Assurance team can test it.

“We look for issues from all angles,” said FRG’s Quality Manager, Weston Rainey. “We notice everything from font sizes to how one browser’s display compares to another.”

Most importantly, Quality Assurance associates simulate the user experience in each role type and test each hyperlink, pop-up, and menu option. Some tests support testing with automated interaction integrity tools, and FRG is working to imbed these artificial intelligence solutions into its Quality Assurance process wherever possible. If these tests produce a negative result, FRG testers follow up by visually inspecting hundreds of interactions, click by click.

Beyond rendering, FRG uses two critical, advanced tests called “drill through” and “drill across” link tests. When users “drill across” one report to another, they find that the number of members for a month for a payor+product+pcp combination is consistent for the same filter combination on each report: this is drill-across consistency. When users “drill through” by clicking on a summary figure to review the detail behind it, they receive what a bank teller calls “exact change” on the next report: when $100,000 in claims expense for a month is drilled through, it produces a list of claims that add to the same figure: $50k, $20k, two $10ks, … a five and five ones (in thousands of dollars). “Drill across” and “drill through” consistency combine to make AccuReports® a powerful financial analysis tool.

Although the Application Development and the Quality Assurance teams deliberately report to separate leaders, they engage in a collaborative scrum until the work is done. FRG incentivizes the developers to complete the coding and rewards the reviewers when they refine the codebase. Together, they ensure application quality.

Data Processing

FRG customers appreciate the easy-to-spot trends and their drivers in AccuReports® all with only a few clicks. And FRG’s data processors are the ones to thank. Each month for each plan at each data release, the data processors apply multi-step inload and normalization programs to unify the data within the AccuReports® data model. The FRG Quality Assurance team reviews the work each month for each plan at each data release before go live.

Those who work with the data, such as health plan data managers or information services department staff at medical service organizations, know that formats are subject to change. The FRG Data Processing team has seen it all and quickly adapts. The Data Analytics team applies a combination of automated systems and human review to the data, preparing it for use within AccuReports®, and FRG data and service team management completes a final review of the data before finalizing and delivering it to clients through the application.

What do these teams look for? “We look at the data files and check for variances outside the norm,” said Rainey. “We are usually expecting a new month of data, some prior period restatement, and maybe close out of long-settled months.”
FRG has developed a proprietary reporting package of change control reports that increases the visibility of the variances, both quantitatively and qualitatively. These reports along with the alignment of data processors and quality assurance associates in a similar but separately incentivized framework is another hallmark of FRG Quality.

Analytic Assessment

Understanding trends, discerning variances, and making sense of it all is the job of a financial analyst, and FRG application testers have this responsibility, too. By adjoining these two skill sets, FRG Quality Assurance associates ensure the application functions to structure their inquiry into the data, which they have tested, and then they expect consistent results when each client’s data is staged for user acceptance.

Sometimes, however, the application still won’t give correct change even after all these phases. The web functionality may have worked in testing, and the client’s data integrity testing showed expected variances. But still a glitch! FRG stages data for client approval, and when we detect these circumstances before the staging the data, the team always investigates further, starting with the analyst perspective. These glitches are often the result of unexpected data structures, such as special characters in the new month data, and the teams work them until the application performs as expected.

Interwoven

“Our testing is a multistep process,” said Rainey. “We come up with specific tests for each type of assurance item and conduct them in multiple ways.”

Because of this level of rigor, we can offer thousands of users nationwide a reliable, robust system.

In short, FRG’s approach to comprehensive service quality hinges on three main tenets:

1) Development teams and quality assurance teams are paired but managed and incentivized independently: one does the work and another checks.

2) Trained quality assurance associates always perform overreads of technical production activities: somebody looks at it before it goes out.

3) Quality associates embrace the customer perspective not the vendor perspective: does this report meet my expectations or, better yet, delight me?

This is FRG’s Quality Assurance fabric. Want to thank an associate? Email helpdesk@frgsystems.com.