Volume 38 Number 6 | December 2024
Victoria Roop, MLS(ASCP)CM, ASCLS Today Volunteer Contributor
Laboratory medicine plays an important role in the clinician’s care of patients. Therefore, it is important for laboratory professionals to implement an effective quality assurance (QA) program with the focal point on patient safety to be able to identify and prevent errors. The QA program needs to be able to identify undesirable outcomes, evaluate the risk to the patients, and be able to provide proper follow-up and preventative measures. The next generations of laboratory professionals are the key stakeholders to being leaders in laboratory stewardship.1
Laboratory professionals must assist clinicians in selecting the right test for the right patient at the right time.1 I recently got involved in financial denial meetings that take place quarterly to review common test denials. This post-analytical feedback on real-time data collected made leadership aware of the importance of laboratory medicine in overall healthcare processes. One of the larger denial projects to tackle was the overuse of a gastrointestinal (GI) molecular multiplex panel run on the Biofire. From the information provided by the committee, and with the help of other laboratory clinics, the organization was able to send out education and ordering algorithms to help clinicians determine when to order the GI panel versus other ordering practices. This not only helped reduce costs but also added safe ordering practices for patients’ health.
“Laboratory professionals must assist clinicians in selecting the right test for the right patient at the right time.”
New technology has given rise to a more robust quality management system. Technologies like Microsoft Teams, Skype, Slack, SharePoint, and Power BI, just to name a few, have made tracking errors easier and more efficient. There is transparency where anyone within an organization can visually track process improvements that can help with patient safety. Power BI has become a useful tool in tracking trends in specimen rejections, turnaround times, and draw volumes. These technologies break down communication silos and help build multidisciplinary team involvement.
There is no single intervention to prevent errors available, and there is a pressing need for rigorous evaluations of possible solutions to benefit the safeguard of patients.1 Therefore, laboratory professionals need to start to integrate themselves in other multidisciplinary teams, like the financial denial committee mentioned earlier in this article. Laboratory professionals can also be more involved in information technology (IT) teams within healthcare organizations, medical rounding on patients with all stakeholders involved, evidence-based practice groups, and supply chain management committees, to name a few.
Laboratory professionals need to have an awareness of the impact laboratory errors can have in patient management.1 Daily huddles are a great place to talk in real-time about issues or errors that come up in work processes throughout the day. Reaching out to other resources for insight and solutions has helped improve patient outcomes, too. With the recent blood culture shortage that created major patient safety concerns nationwide, the laboratory professionals came together to come up with alternative solutions to the supply chain issues. The laboratory teams had to be the driver to ensure patient safety was number one. It was just another great example of how resilient laboratory professionals can be and offered the opportunity to re-educate other healthcare teams on the importance of blood culture collection. An effective quality assurance program incorporates all these things and more to provide the best quality care for patients.
Reference
- Plebani M, Aita A, Sciacovelli L. Patient Safety in Laboratory Medicine. 2020 Dec 15. In: Donaldson L, Ricciardi W, Sheridan S, et al., editors. Textbook of Patient Safety and Clinical Risk Management [Internet]. Cham (CH): Springer; 2021. Chapter 24. Available from: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK585627/ doi: 10.1007/978-3-030-59403-9_24
Victoria Roop is the Laboratory Manager at Door County Medical Center in Sturgeon Bay, Wisconsin.