Acting with urgency, delivering for patients
One of the team’s first actions was hiring a full-time on-site lab director. Five months prior to the transition, the newly hired director moved to Alabama to become acquainted with the area, the health system and the people.
Labcorp believed this investment in the short-term was the right thing to do for the lab, employees and patients. This enabled the new lab director to get a firm grasp of the system’s goals, opportunities and challenges so improvements could start on day one.
Part of the transition planning process revealed aging chemistry equipment at Infirmary Health, so Labcorp recommended, ordered and installed new analyzers prior to the transition. Because the transition was from another commercial lab service provider, some actions could only legally take place the day the new provider took over.
To avoid any negative impacts to patients, Labcorp leaders and vendors from across the country were flown in to be on-site for the midnight changeover to train staff, run testing and confirm the new equipment functioned properly.
Once on-site, the support team remained there 24 hours a day, for weeks, to help lab staff feel comfortable with the new equipment.
Real-time analytics to boost productivity
As part of its standard laboratory management arrangement, Labcorp installed robust reporting tools to provide performance metrics and real-time data on the Infirmary Health lab, including Visiun®. This proprietary lab management software is the leading provider of performance analytics for the laboratory industry.
Visiun combines evidence-based guidelines with real-world benchmarking data to provide meaningful and actionable clinical intelligence and analytics to help monitor key performance indicators. For Infirmary Health, this data helped drive continuous, real-time improvement efforts in staffing, productivity and service.
With this new level of support, Infirmary Health received a daily dashboard showing the prior day’s work, as well as a second dashboard every afternoon showing that morning’s results.
The daily dashboard:
- Provided 12 hours of advanced planning time to correct any issues
- Allowed Infirmary Health leaders to react in real time
- Offered easy access to data, as all reports were waiting in leaders’ inboxes each morning so they could discuss them in their daily huddle