success story

A top medical device company improved specimen tracking to prevent errors in diagnosis and treatment

with Virtusa's mHealth automated specimen tracking solution

Improving patient safety and reducing specimen errors remain top priorities among laboratories, with 90% of surveyed labs stating that specimen labeling errors are a key concern for their labs.

Studies indicate an error rate of 0.1% on mislabeled sample tests in the US. It may seem like a minuscule number but weighing against approximately 8 billion sample tests performed in the US annually is not a small number to ignore.

A specimen or patient identification error has cascading effects to wrong treatment that can also be life-threatening.

Manual tracking of specimens dispatched from the operating rooms to the pathology labs often causes errors like mislabeling and delays in diagnosis.

A medical device company realized the potential to eliminate such errors by digitizing the process and leveraging the right technology with Virtusa as their IT consultant and implementation partner.

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Optimizing the specimen sample labeling

Mislabeling of specimen samples affecting diagnostic quality and treatment

South Asian division of a Top 3 Global Medical Device company faced many challenges, like mislabeling specimen samples affecting diagnostic quality and treatment. Some of the key challenges they faced are:

  • Manual tracking of specimens dispatched between the surgical and pathology departments caused delays and mislabeling errors. 
  • The medical staff's manual tagging of specimens often leads to errors in filling out, verifying, or logging in the patient's details. 
  • Specimen tracking depended on an Operating Room (OR) assistant's telephonic communication with lab technicians inside the operating room, often leading to misidentification errors.
Digitize the labeling process and reduce communication error

Leveraging Responsive app for smart data capture

Virtusa designed and developed mHealth - a solution to enhance the client's existing user interface and improve the diagnostic workflows to reduce the rate of errors arising from misidentified samples.

Our overall solution strategy components:

  • Smartphone App-based integrated communication solutions - A native android app with built-in barcode scanning and offline sync capabilities. The application ensures clear, scannable labelling of specimen vials and slides, eliminating identification errors using a sync adapter and encrypted encryption Realm local DB. 
  • Mounted Tablet-based video conferencing web portal- Designed a dynamic and responsive web portal with dashboard, search, and test result update features. The design ensured the right security while accessing the application and communicating from the portal. 
  • The microservices-based solution hosted in the cloud makes it scalable, resilient, and secure. 
  • Flexible and scalable Microservices Restful API leveraged to develop middleware using the .Net core platform to ensure application programming interface-level security.
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More time for Operating Room Assistant to focus on their core work

With Intelligent App taking care of timely labelling and approvals automatically

Through automation, Virtusa helped the client save a significant amount of time and person-hours spent correctly labeling and tracking specimens. Here are three benefits the client recorded by switching to the Intelligent Automation powered m-tracking process:

  • The OR mobile app stored data locally and synced to the back end periodically for offline operations helping OR staff access data quickly, regardless of internet connectivity. 
  • The responsive web portal hosted in Operation Theater helped in Safety and Error Prevention instead of rectifying the errors. 
  • Improved communication and collaboration between laboratory and healthcare professionals. 
  • Regular Audits and feedback on labeling errors helped to eliminate these errors or minimize the relative risk of errors.
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Medical devices and diagnostics

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