AIIMS Pathology Reduces Error-rate Significantly using LiveHealth
Dr. Gaurav Chhabra, Asst. Professor Pathology at AIIMS Bhubaneswar, shares how lab automation has helped reduce errors and leakages leading to more reliable results.
All India Institute of Medical Sciences, Bhubaneswar is one of the apex healthcare Institutes established by the Ministry of Health and Family Welfare, Government of India. It is operational for the last 15 years providing healthcare services to the country. It continues to be a centre of excellence in medical education, training, healthcare and research imbued with scientific culture.
AIIMS not only provides medical facilities but also acts as a centre of research. AIIMS Department of Pathology specializes in the diagnosis of blood and histopathology, and processes more than 500 samples everyday.
Before switching to LiveHealth, AIIMS’ daily operation relied heavily on paperwork which was time-consuming, cumbersome and prone to errors. Registering patients, generating receipts, preparing patient reports, and maintaining accounts record files followed a manual process. As a result, the pathology lacked efficient and faster management of lab workflow.
With growing volume of test samples each day, the management started realising the need for an advanced technology support to organise and better manage their laboratory. The increasing hassle due to dependency on paperwork, unavoidable human errors, and unorganised data was becoming a serious challenge for the pathology.
Getting Started with Automation
Taking entirely human-led operations to a fully automated platform initially appeared to be a daunting task for AIIMS Pathology. However, with LiveHealth’s quick on-boarding and easy instrument interfacing the entire unit transformed its work pattern in just a few days. What really amazed the team was — the fast and clearly evident results of this transition.
Workforce Efficiency Growth Fueled by Automation
Earlier, manual entry of data at every stage led to recurring errors which were hard to trace and control. After switching to LiveHealth’s cloud based LIS, AIIMS pathology has significantly reduced its error-rate. Test results are now auto-fetched directly from interfaced instruments and fed into the respective formats to generate reports automatically, thereby, eliminating manual intervention completely. The staff is now able to carry out operations faster and with greater efficiency.
-Dr. Gaurav Chhabra
Asst. Professor Pathology | Laboratory Medicine
Building Reliability & Success with Cloud
While automation helped AIIMS Pathology in taking care of errors and paperwork, the cloud platform solved another major challenge for them. Absence of digital records for day-to-day lab activities was earlier a hindrance in accessing and utilising vital information for smooth operations. Moving to LiveHealth LIMS now has all the information and activity log stored securely on cloud. Be it patient records, daily finance log, or business summary, everything is now accessible at the tap of a button from anywhere anytime.
Embracing automation and cloud based platform for advanced management of Laboratory was the much-needed move for AIIMS department of Pathology. With more than 2 years of using LiveHealth now, AIIMS Pathology has end-to-end technology-driven operations giving more quality output, easy accessibility and greater reliability of data.
