Automated outsourcing at Barts Health NHS Trust
Barts Health NHS Trust is using TalkingPoint's "automated outsourcing" workflow to automatically transfer outsourced histology reports directly into the LIMS.
The Cellular Pathology Department at Barts Health NHS Trust is part of the East and South East London Pathology Partnership, and is one of the largest in the country. With 33 consultant pathologists and 50 registrars, the service offers a broad range of specialised histology and cytology reporting.
Drivers for change
The Cellular Pathology Laboratories are located on the Royal London Hospital (RLH) site and report on up to 70,000 cases a year.
Facing consultant resourcing issues, a growing workload and pressure to improve reporting turnaround times, the Cellular Pathology service needed an innovative approach to meet growing demands on the service. Outsourcing to Source LDPath was helping to alleviate resourcing issues, however the transfer of cases to the Trust’s LIMS, involved a significant amount of manual processing and, due to workload, authorisation of the outsourced reports was often delayed.
A user centric approach
Mohammed Rafique, Deputy Pathology IT Manager explains: "The reports were coming into one authorisation queue for our consultants to review. As they have various specialties, it was time-consuming for them to review the queue - they would have to scroll through to find the reports waiting for their authorisation.”
A connectivity solution was required to enable reports from Source LDPath to be automatically imported into the LIMS (WinPath Enterprise). TalkingPoint's auto-transfer workflow was deployed to automate the process and to perform a number of data checks. The automation also creates a cancer authorisation queue.
Explains Mohammed: "We developed a close and productive collaboration with the TalkingPoint Team and were impressed with TalkingPoint's expertise and understanding of our LIMS and willingness to explore ways to improve our workflow as exampled by the cancer authorisation queue. The cancer authorisation queue holds any report containing a cancer SNOMED code. These reports are dealt with straightaway which is beneficial for the patient pathway and supports our commitment to the 10-day turnaround on cancer reporting. The Pathologists review the cancer report queue as a matter of priority to identify if further work or molecular testing is needed, thus preventing any delay. If no additional work if needed, then the report is authorised straightaway."
Benefits
The auto-transfer workflow was deployed at Barts Health NHS Trust on 1st August 2023 and within a matter of days, almost 100% of reports were being authorised on the same day as being reported.
The automation, once started, operates without human intervention, compiling lists of priority cancer cases and any reports with queries.
The TalkingPoint automation performs patient demographic and SNOMED code checks.
“TalkingPoint has its own SNOMED table which compares the LDPath SNOMED tables to our own. Now, if there's a mismatch in the patient demographics or SNOMED coding, TalkingPoint places the report in an error folder for us to review. This is a much faster, accurate and robust process in comparison to manually copying and pasting reports into the LIMS."
About Automated Outsourcing
The TalkingPoint bidirectional automated outsourcing workflow automates the transfer of cases between LIMS and external pathology reporting services.
- The workflow is LIMS and outsourcer agnostic, transferring outsourced reports directly into the LIMS.
- A series of complex checks are performed automatically by the workflow. This eliminates errors associated with repetitive manual cutting and pasting and identifies any anomalies for inspection.
- Automated outsourcing minimises errors and processing delays - data from client sites shows that outsourced reports can be authorised on the day of receipt when automated by TalkingPoint.
To learn more, please contact us.
