Horiba Medical equipment has helped Airedale General Hospital significantly improve its auto-validation procedures for haematology results.
With more than 60 per cent of all results now being safely and intelligently validated automatically, this has freed up staff time, while also improving turnaround times and service levels.
In reviewing its requirements for new routine haematology analysers, the pathology laboratory at Airedale General Hospital recognised the need to implement smooth working practices in order to ensure the best use of staff time.
IT-based solutions ensuring efficient data management and subsequent automatic results validation were considered a key differentiator in the tender selection process.
'Having worked with Horiba Medical for a number of years, we were impressed by reliability of our previous ABX Pentra high-throughput haematology analysers,' said Dr Afruj Ali Ruf, consultant healthcare scientist.
'Horiba Medical has also always provided us with an excellent level of customer service and training support.
'We now need a greater degree of data management support and the ABX Pentra ML was the most flexible data manager that we had seen, giving us the greatest scope to safely develop our auto-validation capabilities,' he added.
Adapting the ABX Pentra ML to meet the specific requirements at Airedale was a relatively simple process, since the hospital had already developed basic-rules-based validation with the previous system.
'Having already established our groupings of normal blood count ranges, such as for pregnant and post operative patients based on our historical data, we were able to quickly implement intelligent auto-validation procedures using the ABX Pentra ML,' said Ruf.
'The ABX Pentra ML was simple to configure to recognise such groupings and apply the necessary normal ranges,' he added.
The ability to develop rules based on certain clinical details, clinicians, or even samples from a certain location, as well as good IT links to haematology clinics, has meant that the majority of results can now be delivered in real time.
Faster turnaround times have improved levels of service for patients who may have had to travel long distances to attend clinics.
Airedale encompasses three Primary Care Trusts crossing the Yorkshire/Lancashire border.
'Now that we have our normal ranges established within the ABX Pentra ML, our auto-validation procedures now only ever intelligently flag truly abnormal results,' said Ruf.
'This gives our experienced staff more time to proactively investigate these further to provide more in-depth clinically relevant results.
'Having already achieved a 60 per cent auto-validation rate is fantastic, but we know that we can work with Horiba Medical to make our ABX Pentra ML work even harder for us,' he added.
In addition to the two ABX Pentra ML validation stations in the main laboratory, a satellite ABX Pentra ML validation station has also been installed remotely from the routine laboratory, next to the microscopes used for the examination of blood films.
This means that comments on blood films made for abnormal samples can be typed and uploaded directly to the Lims.
This enables sample validation at the site of the microscope to further increase turnaround times and minimises opportunity for transcription errors.
It also assists workflow as laboratory personnel always know exactly at which stage a sample is in the analytical process.
