6 Ways to Improve Pathology Lab Performance
Enhanced lab performance increases your lab productivity, reliability and reflects over increasing revenue rate for your organization. With better lab efficiency, you reduce your operational expenditures, thereby increasing your profitability.
With the growth in medical advancements, clinical practices and approaches have transformed and become more receptive towards newer technologies. In this changing era, the diagnostic sector too has adopted innovative methods that boost the performance of your lab, promising quality, reliability and enhanced productivity.
Here are some significant ways that can provide simplified lab operations, improve performance and offer you revenue benefits over time. Read ahead and know why they are much required for your lab.
Always use Unique IDs for Patients
The increased number of returning patients and substantial growth in the number of new patients speak about your lab recognition and performance. In order to measure such profitable aspects of your lab, you must have the right data to identify your patients. Using unique IDs you have the ability to identify unique patients, with growth & revenue per patient correctly.
Unique patient ID is an effective way to log patient information and keep track, acting useful at the time of monitoring progress. Pathology software usually comes with such tools that auto-generate unique user id for patients using their contact details or any other set of useful information.
The technique not only eliminates the uncertainty of data management but also prevents duplication of work. By indexing these IDs, labs can store a history of patient records which can be used later to study clinical progress or health history of revisiting patients.
One System for Reporting, Accounting & Patient Management
With the optimisation of laboratory processes, faster delivery options, and improved instruments, we also need better ways to manage patient records. A digital copy of meaningful information is easier to maintain access, update and share within seconds than paper records. And, that’s not it, users get the ability to have an organized way of handling information with better tracking and analysis of all in-and-out information flow adds more benefit in monitoring your financial data within the company’s network.
Having one single system to manage your Patients, Reports & Accounts, you can now set rules & controls on how each aspect affects the other. Simple controls like restricting report access for unpaid reports can significantly reduce leakages.
Digitization of data is also cost effective, easy to deliver and demands comparatively less space on storage. Hence, by digitizing your lab and keeping all laboratory data indexed, staff can shift their focus on valuable processes than data retrieval and maintenance tasks.
Streamline Sample Accessioning Process
Sample management is very important but also complex part of lab management. During sample management, even the slightest mistake alters operational output; affecting the end result on the whole. Misplaced samples, wrong/incomplete data entries, lost samples, etc. are few of the recurrent mistakes that tend to happen while handling a huge volume every day.
Sample accessioning as a process, paired with a well-implemented software system, allows you to identify samples and simplify your entire sample management process. It involves using barcode labels right from the time of sample collection, or at the time of accession. By tagging samples and segregating them in categories, accessioning benefits your lab in more than one way. Soon after labeling, the barcode acts as a tracker to your sample. Be it collected or outsourced, you can track and locate your sample with such tags.
Simply with a barcode reader or by scanning, your machine will identify the ID, without requiring any human interference at the time of processing. With streamlined sample accessioning that has huge benefits, you can save processing time and improve accuracy at operations.
Automate Lab Instruments — Interface with LIMS
Pathology labs prefer LIMS as it serves as a technology that can reduce human efforts and produce results free of any error. Despite that, many processes like passing test commands, entering values, etc. are handled by staff members working at the lab, thereby, being prone to human-errors.
Machine interfacing adds an advantage to your lab business. It prevents human intervention at the time of sample processing, producing end results free from human-induced errors. Although to generate accurate reports, ensure that you go with bi-directional machine interfacing. Bi-Directional interfacing is more preferred as compared to uni-directional interfacing, as it has almost zero chances of human interference. By interfacing machines with your LIMS, you get quality output in a lesser amount of time.
Manage and Control Stock Efficiently
Another challenge that laboratories recurrently face is to perfectly manage inventories without increasing the amount of wastage or unnecessary expenditure. Failing to keep a check on stock items is amongst the many causes that result in wastage; especially those items are wasted that are highly perishable. Due to such an invariant issue, labs require effective inventory management software.
An inventory management system is also available as standalone software or comes as a part of the pathology lab software. By choosing the one that provides a smarter and better way to control and manage stock, you will know the right amount of stock to be planned as well as plan the next order efficiently.
Keep Quality Control and Calibration of Equipment in Check
The efficiency of your lab depends on how well your machines are functioning. Ensure that you run time to time quality checks over them and keep them from causing any error. Also, keep them well-maintained and calibrated as per standardized formats so that we receive accurate output and keep performance from being affected.
There are robust Lab Automation Software available today that can address major operational loopholes that influence laboratory performance and improve your lab’s productivity. As these solution-based ways are all-inclusive in a single Laboratory Information Management System, we must look for having it in our lab.
