Is there anything in that little white lab box? – Optimizing specimen collections
It’s safe to say every business has efficiency in mind. Increases in operational efficiency generally means lower costs, improved margins and improved consumer experience - consumers can get their products faster and potentially at a lower cost. For healthcare, efficiency is even more paramount - people’s lives are at stake. Efficiency can mean the difference between someone getting the urgent care they need or not.
Labs are where things go to be tested. If you’ve ever been to the hospital to give a urine or blood sample and then been told to go home and wait for a call from the doctor, it’s likely that your sample was taken to a lab. For your sample, along with the hundreds of other samples, there’s a whole supply chain setup to ensure they get collected and taken to the right lab, and the results find their way, confidentially, to the right client and their doctor. This commonly involves a white lab box. The sample is placed in the box and someone makes a trip round all the lab boxes and collects them, ready for dispatch. The method of collection is most commonly dictated by the lab itself, who generally give 3 options: a private fleet pickup, collection by an independent courier, or collection by a larger entity such as UPS. Those methods vary in frequency: a collection can be done on-demand when needed or, for sample locations producing many samples, collection is done at specific times throughout the day. In doing so, individual practitioners taking the samples are powerless to make decisions or provide information to improve the efficiency of the system and deliver a higher quality of healthcare.
Not every box always has a sample for dispatch. In fact, 10-30% of lab boxes don’t. Ultimately, this can lead to two forms of waste. Either the nurse has to call or email through to a lab logistics company each time a sample is taken, which is less time delivering quality healthcare. Or the collection van appears but collects nothing, wasting the time and cost in driving. That efficiency increases even more when it's a third party logistics firm driving a route around rural clinics and hospitals collecting samples. An empty box might mean miles of wasted travel and hours of wasted time. BoxLock changes that.
For a lab box, three things are key:
Efficiency - ensure someone comes promptly to collect samples when there are samples available to collect
Visibility - only the practitioner taking the sample and the assigned collector should be able to gain access to the box.
Security - to be HIPAA compliant, the regulatory requirements for healthcare, the box must be locked and secure.
BoxLock uniquely addresses each of these, delivering significant benefits over a standard lock and key. BoxLock incorporates a barcode scanner into a connected padlock. That combination means only the person with the correct barcode can access the samples, which is far more secure than a key that can be lost or stolen. Furthermore, the connected, Internet of Things features of the BoxLock means BoxLock knows when a sample has been placed in the box and can communicate that with a central system to minimizes time wasted traveling to and opening empty boxes. The result: whatever the collection system, the right people know when collection is needed and can optimizes routes and pick-up times accordingly to minimizes cost and maximizes the quality of healthcare delivered.
The level of security and information available with BoxLock when integrated throughout a supply chain, both at the micro-scale of an individual lab box and the macro-scale of an entire hospital, clinic, or lab, brings a new level to traceability and accountability. Every player in the chain from the moment the sample is collected to the points the results are given to the individual can have peace of mind that knowledge of where the sample travelled is readily available. This minimizes the risk of a lost sample or one being sent to the wrong address and enables the identification of the exact point a mistake was made.
The inefficiency of the current sample collection system is obvious as are the array of benefits that come with investing in sophisticated, secure lock systems such as BoxLock: maximized efficiency through data-driven decision making and improved security, ultimately enabling improved quality of healthcare. Doctors, physicians, clinics and hospitals should be pushing labs to provide such technologies because these benefits translate to all players.