Can Turn around Time Compliance in Hospital Laboratories be Set to Auto Pilot Mode? – A 2 Years’ Experience

Background: A short Turn Around Time (TAT) is unanimously desired and equated to efficiency of a hospital laboratory. Despite automation, laboratories often find it difficult to meet the TAT demands. The major lacuna noticed was that our technicians did not know exactly when a sample was likely to exceed the TAT limit.

Methods: This prospective study was done to develop display screens giving real time information to the working staff and to assess their impact on the TAT compliance. Real time information on daily TAT status, color coded list of pending samples and technician’s daily performance were displayed as screens and graphs using aspx/PHP script and data extracted from hospital database. The TAT outliers data was then compared before, during and after the study.

Results: The project was initiated in November 2017 and the modules were implemented by December 2018. The TAT compliance of urgent samples significantly improved from 80-85% in Oct-Dec 2017 to 90-95% in Jan-Mar 2018. After the implementation of the screens, more than 90% of urgent and routine samples were released within 105 and 180 minutes of receiving respectively. The corresponding figures before this study were > 120 minutes and 300 minutes for urgent and routine samples respectively.

Conclusion: By providing the staff actionable information, on a real time basis, we were able to achieve a high TAT compliance. As this was achieved by only displaying relevant information and not by policing, judicious use of technology can help laboratories achieve TAT targets on an auto-pilot mode.