Lab world plus is unique and state-of-art referral pathology laboratory conceptualized, owned and managed by a group of qualified pathologists and microbiologist. We are focused towards minimizing lifestyle diseases with advanced diagnostic services and empower doctors with fast and accurate diagnostic, helping speedy recovery of the patients.
IT plays a very vital role in such kind of laboratory where it helps to reduce errors and reduces turn around time by unique barcoding and bidirectional interfacing. Remote centre connectivity and mobile based application is a value addition.
2. As a healthcare provider, what are the key challenges you are facing in the healthcare delivery and patient care?
Laboratory tests plays an important role in the patient-centric healthcare delivery. Physicians rely on accurate and timely laboratory test results for diagnosis of disease and guiding the treatment. Maintaining consistent accuracy and minimizing the Turn Around Time (TAT) are always the key challenges. Most of the times pre-analytical errors result in unnecessary testing thus leading to additional financial burdens on the patient and/or the healthcare provider. Pre-analytical errors are inevitable but minimizing them is a key challenge. As a business, it becomes vital to record every transaction and communication to deliver the best experience to your customers. Besides monitoring of business resources, operations, referral relations, marketing, finance, inventory, etc. is required to ensure efficiency at operational level.
With so much data and information being generated daily, managing, monitoring and effectively controlling the management information is a challenge..
3. What’s the role of information technology (IT) in meeting these challenges?
Information Technology as a tool has enabled solutions to meet most of the above challenges. The Laboratory Information Management Systems (LIMS) softwares help you to effectively manage the operations of your labs. Using a LIMS software you can automate workflows, integrate the instruments, manage samples and associated information. Besides reducing manual errors through automation and interfacing, some good softwares help you minimize the TAT. Most of these softwares are standalone systems and track almost every transaction and event in the testing process and serve as good Management Information Systems (MIS). Moving further, you can now reap the benefits of advanced technologies like cloud and mobile. The total testing process right from the registration of patient, to sample collection, sample accession, processing, verification, approval to the delivery of reports can be managed from multiple locations on a remote cloud server, in a seamless way. Test reports can be instantly delivered to the patients and their referral physicians via mobile app.
4. What were your concerns with respect to purchasing a comprehensive IT solution for your diagnostic centre?
We are healthcare providers and we always wanted ourselves to stay focused on healthcare delivery rather than develop and manage a IT solution for ourselves. While we were convinced to outsource IT overhead to an agency, we made sure that we hire an expert team in the domain who who will work closely with us, understands our workflow and provides a solution exactly meeting our requirements. We ensured that once the solution is deployed, our solution provider promptly responds to our queries and we get timely support.
5. What are the outcomes you expect in terms of optimising your operations and increasing the revenue? How do you see technology making a difference to achieve these outcomes?
We have deployed LiveHealth — a cloud based, mobile ready solution for laboratory management.
Our software solution serves as central hub for all our stakeholders and operational activities.
Everyone — right from patients, staff, technicians, collection centres, consulting and referral doctors, organisations have to go through this solution for every activity associated with our operations. This helps us track every activity of all our stakeholders and optimise our operations. We get data and insights from this solution that enables us to track our potential sources of revenue and we can capitalize on that. This surely wouldn’t have been possible with a standalone software system, cloud is definitely an enabler!
6. Do you think you were able to reduce the number of human errors by interfacing your medical devices with your LIS?
Definitely. Managing skilled human resource and training them to maintain accuracy in testing has always been a challenge for laboratories. We looked towards interfacing as an effective solution to overcome this.
After implementing unique barcoding and bidirectional interfacing, we have observed a remarkable outcome in the accuracy of our testing.
7. Have you witnessed any difference in the Turn Around Times by using Cloud service provider? How does it benefit from a standalone system?
As mentioned earlier a cloud based solution surely has advantages over a standalone system. We wouldn’t have been able to integrate all our stakeholders and our operations at different locations using a standalone system. LiveHealth being a cloud based solution has considerably minimized the TAT by enabling patient registration right at the point of sample collection, approval by consulting doctors via mobile app and automated delivery of reports to patients on mobile as soon as they are verified and approved.
8. Do you think technology can help you better understand your patient needs? (for e.g. a mobile app or other things?) Has it enabled you to achieve high-quality patient care?
We always believe that the healthcare should be patient-centric. Patient’s active involvement in managing his healthcare has delivered better outcomes. Mobile app has emerged as an effective tool to connect and engage with your patients.
We deliver the medical reports to the patients on a mobile app configured to our lab management solution, thus enabling them to manage their health records and track their health, anywhere, anytime.
Their test reports are linked to information repository in the app where they can know and educate themselves about the tests performed. Informed patients always always lead to better patient outcome.
9. Do you think technology will be a key differentiator for diagnostic centres in the future?
Like many other areas of healthcare delivery, diagnostic services are experiencing an IT revolution.
Diagnostic centres keep pace with emerging IT have found new, more efficient ways to communicate and provide services; educate themselves, their staff, and their clients; market their products; and manage data and information.
With internet becoming primary means of communication, test requests and test results will be communicated electronically. IT has created new marketplace and advertising opportunities for the diagnostics. Increased patient education and empowerment, new testing techniques that are simple enough for home sample collection and IT have combined to create new direct-to-consumer marketplace for diagnostic testing. Collecting and analyzing patient outcome data may become more essential in the marketing of diagnostic services and IT will be key enabler for storage and processing on data. Besides, automation has been, and promises to continue to be, an important force in the changing laboratory marketplace.
