By Jeremy Ford - LabOnline
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When Bumrungrad International Hospital in Thailand first went live with the InterSystems TrakCare electronic medical record (EMR) system, our clinical laboratory took a huge leap forward.
By digitising Bumrungrad’s core laboratory processes — which handle 60–70% of the hospital’s five million annual tests — clinicians were able to place orders directly into TrakCare and receive results within a patient’s EMR, improving turnaround times and ease of use.
Lab reports, delivered in a structured data format rather than a PDF scan, could be analysed in context with the benefit of decision support systems. Patient safety was also protected by eliminating manual transcription errors. Rules-based workflows increased efficiencies and ability to scale, while decreasing risk.
But what about the remaining 30–40% of tests? Could we also digitise them and get similar benefits for 100% of our tests? Even though it had probably never been done before, that was the goal we set ourselves, starting with possibly the most difficult area: microbiology.