Pentra Safe is giving Frimley Park Hospital NHS Foundation Trust remote bidirectional access to its ABX Pentra 60C+ Point of Care (POC) haematology analysers.
Eight of these compact analysers from Horiba Medical are used in various POC locations managed by the trust's POC team.
These include accident and emergency, oncology clinics, a healthcare centre in Aldershot and a satellite community hospital.
Pentra Safe enables the trust to comply with CPA accreditation requirements by ensuring that password-protected access and full audit trails are available for patient-safety purposes.
Lynda Petley, POC manager at Frimley, said: 'I now have complete bidirectional communication from my desktop with our ABX Pentra 60C+ analysers, whatever their location.
'I can also monitor in real time exactly who and how they are using them to ensure that all users are fully competent and the analysers are performing optimally.' Meeting CPA requirements is fundamental for all tests undertaken at the point of care, since it is essential to ensure that only trained personnel who can fully understand the correct operation of remote analysers have access to them.
Guaranteeing the quality of results that doctors ultimately act upon is crucial to the safety of patients.
All trained and approved users are allocated a unique barcode identifier by the Frimley POC team to securely access an analyser's operating system via Pentra Safe.
Any users not meeting the strict competency standards required can be locked out until they are retrained by the POC team, which monitors results quality on a daily basis.
Petley added: 'Having full audit capability via Pentra Safe means that we are able to police all our POC haematology analysers and the competency of the individual users, meaning that we can be completely confident in our compliance with CPA requirements and of course quality of results produced.
'We have found this crucial in an accident-and-emergency environment for example, where there is a high turnover of junior doctors who all require constant training and assessment.
'Our ability to withdraw access rights for a particular barcode identifier gives us the teeth we require to be able to close the training loop.' In addition to the password functionality of the Pentra Safe, which also locks the analyser's screen after it has been idle for a user-defined time period, the new solution also enables secure remote access for POC managers to all ABX Pentra 60C+ under their supervision.
Petley continued: 'The bidirectional access functionality means that I can access all files and run an analyser as if I were in front of it, except for physically loading samples.
'This means that I can not only observe, in real time, performance of users and view patient results, but I can also monitor reagent levels, instigate a cleaning cycle and even monitor the quality-control performance of the system as required.
'This functionality has proven invaluable by enabling me to monitor from my office in Frimley, Surrey, our ABX Pentra 60C+ in our satellite lab at Lymington Community Hospital in the New Forest.' The POC team at Frimley Park has been using ABX Pentra 60C+ analysers successfully for many years.
In addition to its small footprint with five-part differential analysis, the outstanding technical capabilities provide consistently accurate results.
This has enabled the trust to meet: four-hour TATs in accident and emergency, create 'one stop shop' oncology clinics, minimise chemotherapy drug wastage and maximise patient convenience by offering full blood counts in satellite locations.
