How sample testing machines can save lives

In Mumbai, 2014, Badam Jyothi was admitted to a hospital after being diagnosed with dengue. She was treated for the same for six days but later found to be diagnosed with cerebral malaria. But because of a wrong diagnosis, she lost her life after being treated for the same for 10 days. Many like Jyothi suffer due to wrong diagnosis. Reports claim that 12 mn Americans are misdiagnosed every year.

Pathological reports are a foundation to all the treatment carried out. The doctors make their decisions on this report and treat the patient accordingly. These reports are the backbone of all the medical activities. But what if the diagnostic report has some technical or process error; the sample is mixed up or the specimens are lost. These errors will get worse if it involves any fatal disease where the healthcare delivery is more complex.

To curb such problems, the healthcare organizations are embracing for a technology-driven pathological labs with end-to-end automation. With a similar agenda, Metropolis Healthcare wanted to transform its pathological lab which should be a domain mix of human skill as well as technology driven.

The Challenges

Timely and accurate reports are a lifeline to any hospital. Quality assurance processes and timely results impact the entire workflow of the sample. These two critical factors were missing with the previous set up of the hospital. Another major issue that was creating problems was sample tracking as it was necessary for the lab to track the sample journey from the place of origin till it reaches the end destination for processing in the given department. These factors drove the company’s move towards automated sample testing machines.

Ajit Dixit, Senior Vice President, Metropolis Healthcare says," The aim was to establish a lab which is a mix of human skill as well as technology. Today as far as the pathology business is concerned, we have over 600 analyzers and all samples are tested using quality audited machines. The machines are first selected based on international best practices in domain and are then used for sample testing."

Dixit further adds, “We are one of the few laboratories that have received the CAP and NABL accreditation and all are business processes are complied with quality assurance to ensure the accurate reports are delivered to the end patient. We do more than 4,500 tests in almost all the domains and to support such a deep rooted process, it is a must to have a quality framework in place. We have got nearly 6,000 SOPs related to these tests and have policy for all the tests and this is what differentiates Metropolis from our peers.” He continues that at such a highly automated area the challenge is to achieve accuracy and we practice it through rigorous quality audit. The basic foundation of quality assurance is very strong and these QA policies are the capabilities that are integrated with the software.

The hospital follows six sigma policies in which every sample is bar-coded properly for identity management and identity linking. All the machines are interfaced so that the data from the machine is picked up automatically with the middle software and then integrated with the main LIMS software. So, in this case there is no human intervention and all the business processes are weaven around accuracy.

Each sample today is tested on quality authenticated machines and for each machine there is a policy in place that enables to check the machine giving correct results.