Conformance Testing and Interoperability: A Case Study in Healthcare Data Exchange

Correct data exchange is critical for ensuring reliable healthcare systems. Standards based systems are the foundation for achieving this goal. However, standards alone are not enough to ensure this promise; conformance and interoperability testing are essential. We present and compare conformance testing strategies for a widely used healthcare clinical data exchange messaging standard. We discuss in detail an actor-based testing framework and give insight on the approach used in developing the framework. We present an architecture that extends this framework to support testing of integrated healthcare systems using multiple messaging and document data exchange standards.