Case Study – Lewisham and Greenwich NHS Trust

The Client’s Problem

The Queen Elizabeth Hospital is one of the biggest employers in the Greenwich area and serves a growing population of some 220,000 residents.

The hospital’s Pathology Department processed approximately 2,000 test request cards each week. The cards were indexed and filed manually in hard copy form, which was a labour intensive process, often prone to problems and errors. In addition the cards occupied valuable storage space and several cards were lost during this manual procedure.

Critically, patient care was at risk if clerical staff misread or mis-interpreted details prior to data entry into the Laboratory system. The processing of specimens within the laboratory was delayed and the precious time of highly skilled staff throughout the hospital was lost.

Our Solution

CMS Software recommended their TextStor Document Management system to store electronic copies of the cards.

A barcode attached to each card allows the Pathology Department to automatically scan and file electronic copies of the card.

These  electronic documents can now be instantly accessed from the Hospitals own Laboratory software,  saving hours of precious  time. Clinical details can also be interpreted by qualified staff, providing a much-improved customer service.

Queen Elizabeth Hospital has now rolled out Document Management to Biochemistry, Haematology, Transfusion, Microbiology, Histology and Cytology. Queen Elizabeth Pathology Department will evaluate the benefits of Textstor’s indexing feature in providing easy access by staff to quality control and instrument maintenance records.

Business Benefits

“…CMS Software did what we expected and a whole lot more…the WinPath link proved to be very helpful…at a recent staff meeting the view was that the Laboratory cannot do without the software…”

John Pullicino, Pathology IS Manager

You also download an PDF version of this case study from here.