Integrated Software Solutions (ISS) has completed a project to implement a key subset of its Omni-Lab laboratory management suite at Birmingham Children's Hospital (BCH).
Omni-Lab is being used to manage the screening of bloodspots, taken by heelprick from 70,000 newborn infants collected each year in the West Midlands region, either to exclude five serious diseases of infancy or to alert paediatricians to the need for further testing and/or possible treatment.
The work of BCH is part of the UK Newborn Screening Programme and is carried out in conjunction with 12 other centres of excellence nationwide, including Great Ormond Street Hospital for Children, where Omni-Lab is already in use.
The UK National Screening Committee recommends that all babies in the UK are offered screening for phenylketonuria (PKU), congenital hypothyroidism (CHT), sickle-cell disorders (SCDs), cystic fibrosis (CF) and medium-chain acyl-CoA dehydrogenase deficiency (MCADD).
Identified early enough and with the right medication and follow-up during the early years, the impact of these conditions on the affected children can be greatly reduced or even eliminated.
It is therefore vital that tests done on bloodspots indicating the possible presence of any of the conditions during the screening process are acted upon immediately and accurately, which is where Omni-Lab comes in.
Omni-Lab Newborn Screening manages the entire laboratory process, including: the receipt of bloodspot cards from hospitals and midwives; the registration of babies and tests, with full details of collection; interface to laboratory analysis hardware and the automatic filing of results; the provision of the rules-based validation of results, based on laboratory-specified criteria; the automatic generation of letters to midwives/PCTs to request any missing information (such as date of birth or transfusion status) and for repeat/follow-up bloodspot collections based on first bloodspot quality and test results; the elimination of human error arising from the manual keying and re-keying of data; ad-hoc statistical reporting; and electronic interfaces to Child Health Authorities (CHAs) for the upload of babies' demographics and the downloading of test results.
BCH said that it needed more than just a laboratory computer system; it had to be something tailored to its requirements for newborn screening.
According to Paul Griffiths, director of newborn screening at the hospital, he and his colleagues had the flexibility to adapt ISS's Omni-Lab to BCH's requirements.
Of particular importance was the ability to develop the electronic links to the various child health systems.
These allow much of the process to be automated, which saves time and avoids potential errors from unnecessary reading and the retyping of handwritten notes.
Griffiths said: 'Even though we had anticipated the changes being brought about by the National Programme for IT and the individual choices being made by Primary Care Trusts in the region, we wanted a company on board that would be able to work with us and be flexible enough to achieve our goals.'
