Awanui Labs and Medtech Global have collaborated to enable real time reporting of patient lab results, streamlining workflows and increasing visibility at general practices.
Awanui Labs is the largest community lab provider in the country, sending more than 465,000 electronic messages every day, including more than 100,000 to GPs.
The organisation has worked with Medtech to develop an ALEX® API to deliver patient results directly to referrers using Medtech Evolution.
Sixty-four sites are now live with the new functionality, electronically receiving their patient’s test results – including blood, urine, histology and cytology – in real time as they are reported by the laboratories.
This replaces the legacy ‘store and forward’ system currently deployed for most practices.
Bhavesh Daya, Awanui service delivery manager, says the new integration is all about improving patient care.
“We view this integration as a foundational piece of work which will allow both Medtech and ourselves to deliver improved services to practices and ultimately improved care for the patient,” he says.
Increased visibility in tracking results helps streamline communication between labs and GPs, reducing delays and unnecessary calls, ensuring faster issue resolution and fewer miscommunications regarding result delivery.
“There is no longer an issue with sending messages, then waiting a few hours, then sometimes getting an acknowledgement or sometimes not, and then a call from a practice saying we have not received any results in the last two days,” Daya explains.
“Now we know that the result is getting delivered and we know it is being imported, and so we get a faster response.”
Practice experience
Before going live, the integration was piloted with five Medtech sites for seven weeks, sending 22,000 results over that time.
Northcare Accident and Medical joined the pilot in June and account manager Nastassja Aneck-Hahn says it has streamlined workflows at the practice.
“We love all the new technology integrated into Medtech so we are keen to test any new features available and see how they can improve our efficiency,” she says.
“It is real time and we run an urgent care service so one doctor commented that it has greatly assisted them with efficiency and visibility with patient reports, especially high alert reports.”
In the past all lab reports would land in an inbox which had to be “sifted through” by a nurse so this has greatly reduced time and effort for them.
It has also removed underlying issues around duplicate or mismatched results, or inaccurately addressed reports.
“This has really made things faster and easier for the nurses and doctors. It means we never have to go looking for things because it is stuck somewhere in the system,” says Aneck-Hahn.
Looking to the future
Medtech’s general manager integration and infrastructure Lawrence Peterson says the new ALEX® API aims to solve the complexity of tracking medical reports by providing real-time visibility.
The historic ‘store and forward’ process involved an intermediary, which added delays and uncertainty. Now, labs are immediately notified if a report fails to deliver and troubleshooting can start straight away.
Peterson says this integration sets the foundation for further enhancements.
One potential development is notifying doctors of urgent results in real-time, or even prompting follow-up tests based on initial findings.
“In the future, we hope to move past the acknowledgement of receipt, to a receipt and read of the report,” he says, adding that this would streamline processes further, reducing the need for repeat tests and improving patient care.
Daya agrees, saying real time notification of urgent or critical results within Medtech could finally replace faxing.
“This is a foundational piece of work for us to build on to to deliver better services,” he says.
“We now have a dedicated ‘channel’ for Medtech practices that we can specifically customise to introduce new functionality. Once we further progress this rollout, we will be workshopping some potential future enhancements with the Medtech team.”
He adds that development of this API was a simple and straight forward process and he looks forward to continuing to collaborate.
“We had excellent engagement from the Medtech team, they were responsive to our requirements and understood that our customers needed to see continuity in our results,” Daya says.
Peterson says the partnership going forward is strong.
“The future is really exciting in this space,” he says.
Image: Awanui Laboratory in Wellington, supplied by Awanui.
Article republished with the permission of HiNZ. Any requests for further use please contact editor@hinz.org.nz