Blog - The Latest
Wednesday 08 | 23 | 2011
© 2002-2011 PathView Systems, Ltd. All Rights Reserved.
Tracking systems are just one of the many tools that should be at your disposal to help ensure that your
laboratory generates a quality product. If case material is lost somewhere in the workflow and no
quality alerts are triggered, that’s obviously not a good thing.
Quality Assurance and Quality Control needs to be an integral part of every step in the process. It’s a
mindset that every team member must have day in and day out. I doubt that many of you would argue
with the premise. In the real world, however, it’s awfully hard to keep quality issues in mind when your
work is further and further compromised because of reduced staffing, daily crises, or simply
overwhelming volume.
This is where your LIS should come to the rescue. Your LIS should help you prevent ‘dumb’ mistakes. It
should help you ‘see’ problems as they occur, and it should help you analyze your workflow as a whole
rather than require a conglomeration of multiple manual steps.
Here are some examples:
•
Case entry is where the pre-analytical phase meets up with the analytical aspect of the process.
Does your LIS allow you to see pending interface orders and act on them prior to case creation?
Can your clerk log labeling and other collection errors without moving to separate screens?
Remember that this is a very high volume step of the process. If you ask your clerk to log errors
in separate screens, the likelihood of that occurring is less likely than if the tracking of issues is
part of the accessioning screen itself.
•
During grossing, embedding, cutting, and slide distribution all pertinent information about the
case and any quality alerts should be automatically presented. These tend to be production level
steps of an assembly process. Please don't ask your team members to click on inquiry screens or
navigate multiple screens at four in the morning when there are hundreds of cassettes to be
embedded and even more slides to cut. Your LIS should allow each member to enter quality
comments AND know that this information will be not just available but automatically presented
to everyone involved with the case.
•
Entry of results, be they synoptic surgical case type, or Bethesda pap results should encompass a
wide array of quality algorithms, both as results are entered and taken as a departmental whole.
Are there departmental alerts emailed to the chief pathologist? Are cases selected for random QC
validation as results are signed out? Does your LIS allow previous results to be modified after they
are selected for quality review?
•
The LIS should constantly be gathering data in the background. Taken as a whole, management
should be able to use this data to identify and resolve issues with the laboratory workflow.
There are a limited number of systems that do this well. Can your system identify and analyze
process steps on a temporary vs. permanent basis? For instance, few laboratories go through the
trouble of scanning cassette barcodes as cassettes are placed into and taken out of processors.
However, there are times when changes in workflow cause issues in this area. Your LIS should be
flexible enough to allow you to track these workflow steps for a period of time until remedial
actions resolve issues, and easily disable the additional steps when appropriate.
The LIS should help your department generate a quality product. It should do what computers do best;
ensure that each specimen, block, and slide is handled in a manner that assures the most accurate
analysis, no matter what the volume, staffing, or phase of the moon.
PathView Systems, Ltd.
© 2002-2011 PathView Systems, Ltd. All Rights Reserved.
Tracking systems are just one of the many tools that should be at your disposal to help ensure that your
laboratory generates a quality product. If case material is lost somewhere in the workflow and no
quality alerts are triggered, that’s obviously not a good thing.
Quality Assurance and Quality Control needs to be an integral part of every step in the process. It’s a
mindset that every team member must have day in and day out. I doubt that many of you would argue
with the premise. In the real world, however, it’s awfully hard to keep quality issues in mind when your
work is further and further compromised because of reduced staffing, daily crises, or simply
overwhelming volume.
This is where your LIS should come to the rescue. Your LIS should help you prevent ‘dumb’ mistakes. It
should help you ‘see’ problems as they occur, and it should help you analyze your workflow as a whole
rather than require a conglomeration of multiple manual steps.
Here are some examples:
•
Case entry is where the pre-analytical phase meets up with the analytical aspect of the process.
Does your LIS allow you to see pending interface orders and act on them prior to case creation?
Can your clerk log labeling and other collection errors without moving to separate screens?
Remember that this is a very high volume step of the process. If you ask your clerk to log errors
in separate screens, the likelihood of that occurring is less likely than if the tracking of issues is
part of the accessioning screen itself.
•
During grossing, embedding, cutting, and slide distribution all pertinent information about the
case and any quality alerts should be automatically presented. These tend to be production level
steps of an assembly process. Please don't ask your team members to click on inquiry screens or
navigate multiple screens at four in the morning when there are hundreds of cassettes to be
embedded and even more slides to cut. Your LIS should allow each member to enter quality
comments AND know that this information will be not just available but automatically presented
to everyone involved with the case.
•
Entry of results, be they synoptic surgical case type, or Bethesda pap results should encompass a
wide array of quality algorithms, both as results are entered and taken as a departmental whole.
Are there departmental alerts emailed to the chief pathologist? Are cases selected for random QC
validation as results are signed out? Does your LIS allow previous results to be modified after they
are selected for quality review?
•
The LIS should constantly be gathering data in the background. Taken as a whole, management
should be able to use this data to identify and resolve issues with the laboratory workflow.
There are a limited number of systems that do this well. Can your system identify and analyze
process steps on a temporary vs. permanent basis? For instance, few laboratories go through the
trouble of scanning cassette barcodes as cassettes are placed into and taken out of processors.
However, there are times when changes in workflow cause issues in this area. Your LIS should be
flexible enough to allow you to track these workflow steps for a period of time until remedial
actions resolve issues, and easily disable the additional steps when appropriate.
The LIS should help your department generate a quality product. It should do what computers do best;
ensure that each specimen, block, and slide is handled in a manner that assures the most accurate
analysis, no matter what the volume, staffing, or phase of the moon.
PathView Systems, Ltd.
