Project lead: Heather Clarke, RCI Development Lead
Transfusion 2024 outlined key priorities for clinical and laboratory transfusion practice to enable safe patient care, with an objective for NHSBT to implement electronic-requesting and reporting, allowing end to end order communications in a structured, electronic format from request to result. Another driver is that Hospital Transfusion Laboratories (HTLs) have been requesting this functionality, to not only improve clinical management and treatment of patients by incorporating results of referred investigations directly into hospital LIMS, but to improve the accuracy of information exchanged, reducing transcription steps and errors, and saving staff time whilst improving the quality of healthcare delivery and patient experience.
Electronic requesting and reporting of NHSBT reference laboratory tests
NHSBT requested volunteers to pilot electronic-requesting and reporting, starting with fetal RHD screening: one test with five results. These hospitals would require the patient identifiable information, test request and estimated date of delivery (EDD) in the yyyy/mm/dd format to be exported to the NHSBT LIMS. Results are then transferred electronically back into the HTL LIMS. However, these exchanges could not be made directly to or from HTLs to NHSBT. An interface was required: NHSBT adopted Labgnostic (formerly NPEx), “a system-agnostic laboratory interoperability solution which facilitates the electronic exchange of test requests and results among multiple diagnostic organisations”.
King’s Mill Hospital, Royal Derby and Chesterfield, and the Manchester University NHS Foundation Trust signed up and were the first hospitals to go live, using Clinisys Winpath 5.32, Clinisys Winpath Enterprise and Epic Electronic Patient Record (EPR) respectively.
NHSBT are engaging with other LIMS and EPR providers to enable this functionality to be rolled out to all hospitals. Development of this functionality is also now in progress for RCI and H&I.
E-requesting and reporting is helping to improve the quality of healthcare delivery and also patient experience.
Latest progress with this project can be found in the updates section.
