Quality Assurance Specialist at Palladium International

Project Overview and Role

•  Funded under the US President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR) through a cooperative agreement with the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). Palladium Development and Consultancy Kenya Ltd (Palladium Kenya) anticipates 5-year funding to support the Kenya Ministry of Health, county governments, and healthcare service delivery partners to implement technological innovations in health information systems.
• These innovations include the scale-up of electronic medical records systems (EMRs) for clinical decision support and improved patient care,  the enhancement of the Kenya National Data Warehouse (NDW), a centralized data repository of data from EMRs for analysis and reporting, the development of an interoperability layer to support the exchange of data across systems, the enhancement of mHealth solutions and numerous other innovations including patient identification and informatics solutions to support health surveillance.

Position Summary

• Reporting to the Quality Assurance Lead, the Quality Assurance Specialist will take the lead for product quality, deploying HIS Products, identifying production issues, and implementing integrations that meet our customer’s needs in the entire release lifecycle, right from planning, scheduling, automating, and managing continuous delivery environments. He is responsible for assisting the team to meet the quality and availability of the set system.

 Primary Duties and Responsibilities: 

• Build a strong relationship with the development teams to understand the code, its dependencies, and the infrastructure on which it runs.
• Assist the development team with deployment strategy and capacity planning across development, QA, staging, and production environments.
• Investigate and resolve technical issues and maintain HIS Applications’ uptime.
• Implement ways to automate and reduce occurrences of errors and improve customer experience in the deployment of HIS Products.
• Work with the development team to deploy and manage tools that support SDLC automation, configuration management, and release management.
• Perform root cause analysis for production Application errors and resolutions.
• Work in support of the Infrastructure Lead in enhancing the security direction for the organization including systems, networks, user services, and vendor development efforts.
• Design procedures for system troubleshooting and maintenance.
• Evaluate, select, design, and configure security infrastructure systems in all HIS Platforms.
• Conduct infrastructure and network and system tests via simulation or other means to highlight and find any weaknesses that may be exploited.
• Support and conduct internal audits, help mitigate findings and implement improvement measures.
• Develop and apply testing processes for new and existing products to meet client needs.
• Collaborating with the development team to develop and implement the strategies for EMR systems transition and scale-up, systems interoperability/integration, and reporting.
• Estimate, prioritize, plan, and coordinate testing activities of electronic systems (e-health and mhealth solutions). This includes KenyaEMR, NDWH, e-HTS, Ushauri, Nishauri, and Lab systems, among others used in HIV C&T.
• Any other duties assigned by the Quality Assurance Lead.

Required Qualifications

• Bachelor’s Degree, with a major in Computer Science or Information Systems preferred.
• Experience in deployment and maintenance of Health Information Systems.
• Minimum three (3) years of experience in software development, technical support, systems analysis, or Testing/QA roles.
• Experience with and development of functional, interface, integration, and user acceptance testing required.
• Practical experience delivering IT solutions for projects related to clinical information system implementation projects is highly preferred.
• Practical experience working in a central business office highly desirable for projects related to financial information system implementation projects.
• Thorough understanding of healthcare-focused software.
• Experience with creating queries and reports against a relational database.
• Demonstrated ability to manage multiple concurrent projects.
• Ability to work independently, clearly communicating status and work plan.
• Ability to set priorities, produce accurate work, and meet deadlines.
• Ability to function in a setting with a wide variety of duties and numerous interruptions.
• Demonstrated ability to form teams to support QA/Testing efforts, leading and educating teams on processes, assigned duties, and tools.
• Demonstrated ability to understand, analyze and plan testing approaches for typical healthcare computing environments and solutions.
• Demonstrated knowledge of healthcare workflows, including business and clinical workflows for outpatient and inpatient settings.
• Excellent written, verbal, analytical, and communication skills are required.
• Diligent, results-oriented work habits.
• Demonstrated ability to communicate clearly and to understand and solve the problems and information needs of others.