Warrington Hospital has installed eight Rapidlab 1200 blood gas analysers and a Rapidcomm v3.0 blood gas and urinalysis data management system from Siemens Healthcare Diagnostics.
The Rapidcomm connectivity solution enables the POC team to remotely manage multiple blood gas analysers at seven clinical locations including the accident and emergency department, intensive therapy unit (ITU), operating theatre and maternity delivery unit.
From the laboratory, a single user interface interacts with the status and user operation of the analysers.
This enables the POC team to pre-empt problems before they impact onto clinical users and facilitate a real-time, high level of quality control (QC) to ensure accurate test results.
Celia Critchley, point of care co-ordinator at Warrington Hospital said: 'Rapidlab and Rapidcomm give us 360 degree visibility and greater control over testing.
'We can password protect analysers limiting use to only trained and authorised staff.
'This allows us to remotely lock out users and keep records on which staff members may need to undertaken training.
'Having this overall clarity with an audit trail that links into our Hospital Information System saves time and reduces errors of manual documentation.
'Compliance is becoming an increasingly important element within the POC field and the Siemens solutions allow more control to assist with this.
'First, we can keep full, auditable records of our interactions with the analysers and patient data for review or reporting at any point in the future.
'It also gives us the powers to password protect and manage users of the analysers.
'Collectively this gives peace of mind that tests are standardised and compliance reporting is at a high level,' she added.
