As the demands for healthcare continue to rise, so do the challenges faced by healthcare organizations. Shrinking hospital budgets, along with physician and nursing shortages, are among the most visible of these challenges in the public eye. Less visible but no less important are the challenges faced by clinical laboratories, which deliver the first crucial step in the patient care journey – diagnostic medicine. These challenges include medical lab professional staffing shortages, tightened funding, and a higher demand for diagnostic testing by an aging patient population.
Clinical laboratories in the federal healthcare system are particularly vulnerable to the trends stressing healthcare today. Serving nearly 10 million beneficiaries and dependent on federal funding, federal labs are highly motivated to work smarter to achieve the levels of productivity demanded by today’s mounting patient populations.
Fortunately, a variety of laboratory strategies and technology are available today to help federal labs meet this challenge. Read on to discover six strategies for boosting federal clinical lab performance.
1. Vendor-Neutral Connectivity
Vendor-neutral connectivity through open-platform middleware provides a strong foundation for efficient lab infrastructure and operations. This is because truly vendor-neutral lab middleware enables centralized connectivity and communication with an unlimited number of lab information systems (LISs) and devices. With this capability for interoperability, federal labs can add or replace equipment without facing compatibility issues. The flexibility of open-platform middleware also enables labs to upgrade or replace instruments and other lab components without disrupting their entire system. The result is faster time to utilization and the avoidance of costly downtime.
By avoiding being locked into a single vendor, federal labs using open-platform middleware have the freedom to shop competitively for devices to meet their patients’ needs. Moreover, labs can save money when their middleware provider allows for the repurposing of instrument connections without charging additional fees. This is the case with Instrument Manager™ middleware from Data Innovations. Labs pay no additional fees when changing or upgrading instruments after purchasing perpetual, lifetime connections.
2. Autovérification
Autoverification is an automated workflow process that automatically releases test results that fall within a range of accepted parameters set forth in software rules. This allows for test results to be released more quickly for faster diagnosis and treatment, all while following established standards for lab quality and patient safety. By minimizing the need for manual data entry and interpretation, autoverification also decreases the chance of errors that may occur due to oversight, fatigue, or misinterpretation.
With autoverification, lab professionals also have more time to focus on abnormal results associated with patients needing more advanced care. This process ensures that patients with abnormal results receive the level of review and care they need for optimal diagnosis and treatment.
Truly vendor-neutral middleware can achieve an exceptionally high rate of autoverification because it is the most flexible in terms of writing rules for a broad range of tests, disciplines, and workflows. For example, labs using Instrument Manager middleware are able to autoverify up to 95% up their test results. While LIS platforms may include the capability for autoverification, vendor-neutral lab middleware goes further with the capability for more complex, diagnostic rules and automated follow-up actions, such as the automatic triggering of a reflex test based on a patient’s initial test result.
Autoverification enables labs to decrease turnaround times, process higher volumes of tests, and contribute to lower overall healthcare costs as patients are able to move more quickly through diagnosis and treatment, potentially resulting in fewer inpatient days.
3. Automated Quality Control
Automated quality control can also save federal labs significant time in resource hours while reducing the potential for human error by automating time-consuming quality processes. Some open-platform middleware systems offer QC capabilities through automatic instrument monitoring. For example, federal labs can proactively detect deviances in instrument performance before they affect patient results. One such program that makes this possible is Data Innovations’ Moving Averages & Moving Medians module, which connects to Instrument Manager middleware and tracks instrument performance between QC cycles. Deviations that fall outside of standard parameters of instrument performance are flagged by the program, alerting lab personnel to investigate the instrument(s) and complete any necessary maintenance.
Other middleware programs connect to external organizations for automatic peer and QC review. When configured in conjunction with autoverification, test results that pass QC checks are automatically released to the LIS. For those that do not pass QC checks, lab personnel can troubleshoot the cause and then release the results manually. An example of this is the Data Innovations module Daily & Peer Quality Control, which provides real-time connectivity from Instrument Manager middleware to Bio-Rad Unity Real Time (and other QC programs). Test results that do not pass QC review trigger a workflow for lab personnel to intervene immediately to determine next steps. This saves time later, as the lab no longer needs to search for samples to rerun tests and issue corrected reports.
Federal labs can also streamline operations by automating their lab proficiency reporting. Auto-transmission of lab reporting to accreditation agencies such as the College of American Pathologists (CAP) not only reduces resource time, it eliminates the opportunity for manual errors. According to CAP, approximately 40% of proficiency testing errors are clerical, caused by a manual data entry mistake.
4. Streamlined Data Extraction
Streamlined, electronic data extraction cuts resource hours needed for operational, regulatory and compliance reporting. Reporting programs that import data directly from lab middleware also eliminate the possibility of human error that can occur from personnel manually copying data into reports. Federal labs can streamline operations dedicated to regulatory and compliance requirements by employing software programs that do the heavy lifting for them. Data Innovations’ EP Evaluator program accelerates instrument performance validation by performing calculations for more than 100 studies simultaneously. The program also produces automated, inspector-ready reports that meet CLIA, CAP, and The Joint Commission requirements.
Another way federal labs can leverage electronic data extraction is through informatics software for KPI tracking and reporting, which can uncover insights for operational improvements. For example, Lab Intelligence is a program that pulls data directly from Instrument Manager middleware and tracks up to 30 key performance indicators, including autoverification rates, turnaround times, QC violations, and much more. Users can drill down into real-time data reports for root-cause analysis and troubleshooting. A popular use of this application is to track test volume and turnaround times by shift, enabling lab management to adjust staffing levels to meet testing demands.
5. Emergency Preparedness
Emergency preparedness is an important goal of every federal healthcare system, and federal labs have options at hand to support their business continuity needs, should disaster strike. Business continuity solutions are imperative to ensure patient data is never lost and to provide continuity of care wherever possible.
High Availability and Disaster Recovery are modules that connect to Instrument Manager middleware, triggering failover to back-up servers if outages occur. High Availability provides on-site server backup, enabling staff to manually process orders through Instrument Manager until LIS operations are restored. Disaster Recovery protects the lab’s operations and data in the event of a major catastrophe with off-site server failover. For both solutions, labs can maintain seamless operations and recover quickly with minimal demands placed on IT.
6. Responsive Technical Support
Finally, responsive technical support should be a serious consideration of every federal clinical lab, especially in light of staffing shortages. Federal labs are in a stronger operational position when they have the expertise needed to support their complex infrastructure, equipment, and workflows. A crucial question federal labs should ask is whether they have reliable support from their in-house staff or external vendors to be able to quickly address issues and resume operations when problems arise.
With the constraints of today’s lab staffing, vendors such as Data Innovations are stepping up to offer federal laboratories service packages specifically designed for their needs. DI’s Enterprise Sustainment package provides extended support, technical expertise, and consultation to federal labs for optimal laboratory management. Designed to lighten the workload for in-house lab and IT staff, this comprehensive support package also bridges any gaps in knowledge that may occur during employee turnover, ensuring operational efficiencies, productivity, and quality patient care on a consistent basis.
As federal labs work to keep up with increasing demands for diagnostic services, a variety of technology solutions are available to help them improve efficiencies, increase productivity, and enhance patient quality. To learn more about these and other solutions for federal laboratory enablement, visit datainnovations.com/fed.
About Data Innovations
For 35 years, Data Innovations has provided truly vendor-neutral software and solutions for clinical labs to optimize performance across all disciplines. With key solutions spanning lab connectivity, productivity, quality, performance and reliability, and analytics, Data Innovations is credited with establishing the lab enablement software space and driving vendor-neutral solutions that enable each lab to perform at its best. Serving more than 6 000 hospitals and laboratories in over 80 countries, Data Innovations is known for its unparalleled clinical lab expertise and service, contributing to improved patient care while enabling labs to do more with less.
