Standard Inter face Needed

By : Dr Santosh Pawar, Head – Sales (India Pvt Sector) 21st century

With an experience of automating more than 200 labs-both private and public clinical labs, whether standalone or chain of labs in different cities of India and abroad- 21st century is upbeat on the LIS market in the Indian Laboratory space. We found that, irrespective of the market, size, geography, specialty and service offering, almost all clinical laboratories recognize that their goal is to ensure the accuracy, turnaround time and quality of testing in order to be successful and they need to do better service. In addition to that, laboratories’ major challenges are patient privacy, referring physician satisfaction, regulation and compliance, time and logistics constraints, operational efficiency and finally rising cost and competition. However, there are challenges, with respect to the mindset that some stakeholders still treat IT planning and  implementation as a technology game, not as a clinical process improvement.


Need for lab process consulting

There are cases where LIS applications are procured and installed as it is and lab decision makers do not consider with the outcomes of automation and change management with respect to clinical process excellence. Rudimentary, duplicate, manual and administrative processes in the lab need to change to automatic and patient centric processes. If IT systems are implemented in alignment with the existing processes as it is, they will just bring an aura of pseudo-efficiencies. At the end of the implementation there should be a role to change management and a transformation in the care system should be felt by patients and users of the system.

Interface to equipments

Today, most of the popular lab instruments and analyzers are capable of being interfaced to a LIS.

Whether uni-directional or bi-directional, interface to the instruments definitely enhance data flow and elimination of transcription errors means faster and more accurate reporting of results. In addition to that, using one standard HL7 interface for the entire lab reduces implementation, training, maintenance cost and attains interoperability with any third party applications also. The application systems will make sure that the output of samples analysed , tracked, tested and results reported automatically.

It should generate reports that allow pathologist to track turnaround times of all the events and workflows, samples completed per unit of time, samples re-run or repeated,   and if any exceptions. The scheduling feature increases efficiency of control routine sampling, analysis, and instrument calibration and maintenance tasks.

Here the objective is to develop an integrated workflow in the lab processing to data management for each clinical specializations such as Biochemistry, Haematology, cytology and microbiology and people/users attached to each specializations considering the hierarchy of users. Effective laboratory workflow with efficient amplification, sequencing, and analysis of samples greatly enhances throughput capabilities, decreases unit costs, and significantly impacts the amount of time. A significant advantage can be derived if the workflows are designed in consideration of modern advances in technology like web booking/reporting with integration to payment gates or device like pneumatic shoots for sample transport. This will further benefit laboratory processing and data review by the lab technicians and doctors sitting at geographically dispersed centres. Finally, a LIS application with capability of user definable configurable screens, workflows, policies, alerts-alarms, dashboard, documents and reports will be one best system for maximum end user satisfaction with the system.

Once the LIS application is deployed based on the business process mapping and improvement blue-print, implementations do have quick and visible benefits for the organisation, once the system is deployed and proper training is provided, it retrieves specific information from vast amount of data using the personalised reporting for key users such a lab technicians, pathologist and lab administrators. The system should eliminate a significant amount of paper records (near to 100 percent), and thereby the occurrence of loss or misfiled data, files and worksheets.Once the LIS application is deployed based on the business process mapping and improvement blue-print,  implementations do have quick and visible benefits for the organisation, once the system is deployed and proper training is provided, it retrieves specific information from vast amount of data using the personalised reporting for key users such a lab technicians, pathologist and lab administrators. The system should eliminate a significant amount of paper records (near to 100 percent), and thereby the occurrence of loss or misfiled data, files and worksheets.

Published in eHealth, February 2013 issue
Link to article: http://ehealth.eletsonline.com/2013/02/standard-inter-face-needed/