Testing

 In this article, we'll walk through:

• How Welkin allows you to test your changes before publishing to your live program
• Strategies for test patients

After reading this documentation, you will:

• Have strategies for creating test patients in your Test environment
• Have tips for best reviewing your configuration before launch

By default, Workshop has a test environment for you to review your changes before publishing them to your live program. This ensures that you and your team have high confidence before introducing new changes to your Live environment. You may also use this environment for training purposes so that you can train your team before the changes are rolled into your Live environment.

Important note: Your Test environment will not have your real patient information in it. This is to ensure that no patients are accidentally scheduled for Appointments or receive test emails. You can manually create patients to represent the types of patients in your program, for testing purposes.

Creating your test Coach account

To be able to make phone calls from Welkin, you will need to set a phone number in your Coach Profile. This should be a unique phone number that you have access to for making and receiving phone calls.

Creating your test patients

To test the changes you make in Workshop, it’s easiest to do so using the patients you create in your Test environment.

Here are some strategies for how to create a set of patients for your testing purposes:

1. Patient naming: Choose something unique and easy to reference.
2. Setting an email address: If your program relies on email as a key form of communication, we recommend that you set an email address for your test patients. Email addresses should be unique - if your organization uses email aliases, you can use “+” to create unique email accounts. Example: johndoe+testing1@welkinhealth.com. If your organization does not support this capability, you can create additional email addresses using a free service, such as Gmail. Note: Using non-unique email addresses can result in unrecognized communications.
3. Setting a phone number: When testing, update the patient phone number to a number you have access to. We generally recommend that, unless you want to get calls or texts at odd times from your team who might use your test patient for testing, that you remove your phone number from the Patient Profile when you’re done testing. Replace it with a clearly fictitious number such as 415-555-5551. Using non-unique phone numbers can result in unrecognized communications. 

Important: The phone system in your test environment will make real phone calls, so entering a patient phone number that you are not sure is fake may result in spam calling a real person who owns that phone number. We strongly recommend that you use a unique phone number with a test Patient - such as a phone number provided by Google voice that is not the same as the phone number you use on your Coach Profile. Using the same number can result in unexpected behavior when testing your program.

Before your program launch

As you make changes to your configuration, it’s a best practice to periodically verify your changes by testing them. This helps break up the task of verification into smaller, more manageable pieces and allows you to identify any gaps or errors earlier on.

A strategy you may choose to employ is to publish and then test each set of resources you add, or test each end-to-end workflows as you build or modify them.

After your program launch

Because your changes can be published to your Live environment and impact coaches and patients, we recommend that you test your changes thoroughly before publishing.

Review the Changelog to ensure that you’ve verified the changes that you or others on your team have made.

• For content changes, such as Alerts, Assessments, Email Templates, Care Flow Templates or Appointment Prompts - this can be verified by using one of your test patients and adding or applying the content to the test patient
• For Process changes - you may need to recreate the conditions under which the Process would trigger an outcome. Read more about Processes to understand how to build or modify them in Workshop.
• For integration changes - if you modified Assessment responses, Care Flows, or Custom Data types and interact with them via the Welkin API you may need to update the version ID of these entities. The updated IDs can be found in Workshop. If applicable, we recommend that you test end-to-end with your applications.

Additional resources:

• How to access your test environment
• Publishing to Live
• Integrations