West Parry Sound Health Centre Delivers Fast, Clean Results with Sunrise Laboratory™

Change is in the air at West Parry Sound Health Centre (WPSHC), and it's already paying off with more responsive patient care and lower costs. In recent years, the Parry Sound, Ontario, acute-care hospital has moved into a new building and launched major technology upgrades, starting with the Eclipsys laboratory information system (LIS), Sunrise Laboratory. Within a year, WPSHC virtually eliminated lab-based overtime and clerical errors, and reduced test-result turnaround time by up to 50 percent.

The December 2005 activation complied with a mandate from Ontario Laboratory Information Systems - part of Ontario's Electronic Health Records interoperability initiative - to implement an interoperable digital LIS. After initially installing the Chemistry, Hematology and Microbiology modules, the lab activated the new PowerBANK™ Enterprise Edition blood-bank module in March 2007 and scheduled the Anatomic Pathology go-live for May. WPSHC planned to activate the Eclipsys clinical suite, Sunrise Clinical Manager™, by the end of the year.

Clean, Accurate Results
Before the activation, WPSHC suffered from widespread dissatisfaction with its paper-based system. "There were a lot of physician complaints around clerical errors," said Rhonda Borchardt, Manager of Laboratory Services. According to Borchardt, the practice of manually entering sample data into multiple analyzer machines led to high error rates. Physicians also criticized the poor organization and formatting. "You couldn't configure the analyzers' report formats," said Borchardt, adding that physicians often copied the scattered results into categories by hand, leading to even more errors.

With Sunrise Laboratory, the errors have all but disappeared, and with the streamlined reporting format, the physicians can easily find the data they need without copying. "Now data entry is done once at the front end and demographics are loaded into the analyzers automatically," said Borchardt. "The techs just load, go, and report. We don't have any errors now. It's amazing."

The laboratory easily accommodated physician formatting requests. In fact, ease of customization was a major reason why WPSHC chose Eclipsys. "With most LIS systems, you have to ask the vendor to customize something, and even if they decide to do it, it may take years," said Borchardt. "With Sunrise Laboratory we can do it ourselves. We customized the Microbiology system to suit our workflow."

Fast Turnarounds for High-acuity Patients
Next to accuracy, speed is essential in lab work - especially with high-acuity patients. Before automation, the tedious process of entering data into analyzers was only one of many bottlenecks, including data correlation, report collating, signing, faxing, and filing. "With Sunrise Laboratory, once we've created the order, there's really nothing else to do," said Mark Rahn, LIS Manager.

Turnaround time has improved across the board, with STAT results improving by 50 percent, said Borchardt. This has helped the lab keep up with its reference work from an external community blood center. Previously, this income was offset by frequent overtime. The lab also spends less time measuring workload. "Our monthly workload reports used to take four techs some three or four days to compile," said Rahn. "Now it takes just two people four or five hours."

WPSHC is already seeing improvements in blood-bank workflow after installing PowerBANK, a new transfusion-medicine database module that promotes patient safety. "With PowerBANK we know exactly what units of blood and other products a patient has received without having to search through an index," said Borchardt. "From a patient management standpoint it's light-years beyond a paper system."

The Benefits
With Sunrise Laboratory, West Parry Sound Health Centre has virtually eliminated lab-based clerical errors, and physicians now receive clear, organized reports. Results are delivered in record time - 50 percent faster in the case of time-sensitive STAT results. "The faster the physicians can get those results, the faster they can make decisions," said Borchardt.

Labor costs have also declined. The lab's average of 15 hours of overtime a week has dropped to less than an hour. In recent years, workload has increased by over 20 percent, yet since Sunrise Laboratory arrived, the lab has not needed to increase staffing. The Eclipsys LIS has also helped to weather temporary labor shortages, as well as the crush of extra work during the summer when the population soars.

"For the first time the seasonal workload increase didn't affect us," said Borchardt. "Sunrise Laboratory has been a big benefit for us."