The client is a Fortune 500 medical technologies firm whose products include implants used in joint replacement and trauma surgeries, surgical equipment and surgical navigation systems.

Virtusa developed a mHealth application to help HCPs digitally track specimens dispatched from the operating room to the laboratory using an innovative microservices architecture.

During surgery, a doctor may require examining certain specimens of a patient and obtain test results from Pathology to perform a more accurate diagnosis of a patient. The existing process tracked specimens dispatched from the operating room to the laboratory, from a manual surgical to pathology. However, there were certain inefficiencies in the surgical-pathology examination workflow:

• Involved manual activities of labeling test orders for specimens
• The OR staff had no insight into the status of specimens, once dispatched from OR
• Specimens could be transported through multiple routes and logistic partners across a complex network of operating rooms, specimen processing rooms and Pathology Labs (PL) and faced the high possibility of getting misplaced during transit from the OR to the PL
• There was no established reconciliation process to track all specimens extracted from a patient
• OR faced occasional disturbances with the WiFi connectivity due to certain restrictions inside
• Pathology test results and their status had to be tracked back from PL to the OR
• The incumbent system necessitated frequent communication between OR staff and PL, over the intercom, to find out the status of the specimen
• The incumbent application was not intuitive and user-friendly
• The new application was required to have minimum user interactions, automatically navigating the user to the next steps in the workflow

Virtusa, within a short period of 4 months, developed the specimen tracking application as a proof concept. Powered by cloud-hosted micro-services, driven by intuitive UX, the solution addressed challenges faced in existing Surgical Pathology process by:

• Automating the process of labeling test orders for specimens using QR code scans and tagging the test order from the application
• Providing a graphical view to track the status of the specimens in real time
• Reducing the chances of misplacing specimens by managing the specimen status
• Designing the OR mobile application to hold data locally and sync with the back-end periodically. This ensured that the app worked, even in the offline mode.
• Designing the middleware micro-services to be auto-scalable using the Azure cloud platform which enabled future growth at reduced overheads.
• Adding validations to ensure accuracy of specimen information
• The mobile layer components and middleware layers followed a modular design, allowing reuse.
• Including wizard features to automatically navigate the user to the next step in the process wherever applicable
• Providing a summary view for a reconciliation of specimens scanned and dispatched from the operating room

As an innovation partner, Virtusa delivered the following:

• The solution ensured that all specimens sent from the OR were received at the appropriate PL
• A visual workflow representation of the status of each specimen
• Complete tracking of the specimens that are expected from a PL
• The resulting efficiencies enabled the client to focus on their most strategic product needs
• Taking necessary action if the process needs to be expedited when there is a delay
• Having a track of all individuals involved in the process