Laboratory Turn Around Time Monitor
About the Ministry
The United Arab Emirates Ministry of Health & Prevention (UAE MoHAP) revolutionizes the quality, safety and efficiency of public health care delivery at all 15 public hospitals and 72 Primary Health Care Centers across Dubai and the Northern Emirates. The UAE MoHAP launched the Wareed project in 2008 to pursue a “One Patient, One Record” initiative by deploying Cerner Millennium as the core application. The architecture links all clinical, operational and administrative data into a unified system. In 2015, the UAE MoHAP launched an online Patient Smart portal, a fully integrated bilingual website allowing the individual’s access to health record, the portal allows direct communication with the Ministry’s health care providers. Each patient’s clinical information is stored in Millennium and can be securely accessed by individuals via a browser or smart phone.
The Challenge
Laboratories associated with UAE MoHAP hospitals and clinics perform in excess of 100,000 orders per month. A key performance indicator of laboratory performance is the ability to monitor departmental Turnaround Time. The laboratories relied upon a retrospective monthly report to manage this process. The lack of real-time monitoring frequently caused challenges in prioritizing laboratory tests and numerous telephone calls from wards requesting results.
The Solution
The Laboratory Turnaround Time (TAT) Monitor is a real time interactive dashboard view providing visibility of the individual sample status, based on how long the specimen has been logged in to the laboratory as compared to parameters set by the UAE MoHAP Federal Lab.
This enables the laboratory users to prioritize the test being carried out providing faster service to the patients and allowing laboratories to proactively monitor this important performance indicator. The implementation of the Turnaround Time Monitor additionally introduced efficiencies in the system. Analysis of the Turnaround times using Mann-Whitney U test (Rank Correlation) revealed an average reduction of Turnaround Time overall from 31.82 minutes to 29.22 minutes. This is a highly significant reduction in test processing time of 2.06 (1.83 – 2.26) minutes per test (P > 0.001). This reduction correlates to a saving of over 200,000 minutes (3,000 hours) per month of waiting time for patients and staff to receive results. This saving was reflected in the majority of the hospitals that implemented the Turnaround Time monitor.