Magentus’ Evolution vLab® Laboratory Information Management System (LIMS) has helped public hospitals, pathologists and physicians across one of Australia’s largest states deliver better patient outcomes for more than 25 years.
The long-term partnership with the government health department started with the connection of five regional labs in 1997, revealing significant potential for improving both clinician workflow and patient care across a vast geographic area.
The state’s expansive geography and widely dispersed residents require the department to operate dozens of small regional and district labs. Because many are situated in remote locations, patients are often referred to distant facilities to access the right equipment or specialists. As the value of connecting labs became more evident, it was obvious that the next step should be setting up a fully connected pathology network across the whole state.
Fast-forward to today and the service’s clinicians use Evolution vLab® as the primary interface for processing up to 50,000 clinical enquiries every day across its network of 36 pathology labs and more than 200 healthcare facilities.
Core features
Evolution vLab® is one of the world’s most flexible, multi-disciplinary LIMS. It combines pathology workflows with patient data across services and sites, helping overcome location and distance challenges for both patients and clinicians. This has improved clinical outcomes for more than four million patients across the state, especially those in remote and rural areas.
Evolution vLab® provides a single view of pathology results across multiple disciplines and sites. Clinicians use it as an interface into the many platforms and databases used across its network.
Across the state, Evolution vLab® now ingests data from 14 clinical systems, instruments and applications to deliver a patient’s complete results in a single enquiry. It provides real-time reporting for the network, including benchmarks, quality control and best practice profiles.
A powerful rules engine automates workflows, actions and resource management, overcoming distance and remoteness challenges for patients and clinicians alike.
Digital boost to care
When a patient once may have needed to travel hundreds of kilometres for pathology tests, they can now simply visit their local hospital to have a sample taken. The sample is scanned, stored and securely sent for analysis. This reduces travel and turnaround times for patients and clinicians, speeding up the creation of the most appropriate care plan.
This ‘hub and spoke’ model, enabled by digitisation of health technology, can also overcome skills shortages. Instead of specialists having to travel to remote locations to see patients or vice-versa, Evolution vLabs can instantly and securely send a scanned version of the patient’s sample to the specialist for analysis. Under this model, the specialist could be thousands of kilometres away and even working from home.
A person will encounter a broad range of health services throughout their life. The data that is held by each specialist can form a complete patient history. But the data itself is often siloed and is inaccessible by different locations, disciplines or systems. At best this leads to inefficiency and inequity. At worst, clinical decisions are being made with an incomplete view of a full patient’s history.
The Department says:
“The system’s analytics and clinical reporting support our administrators to make real-time decisions about laboratory operations and care pathways. Its interoperability with other systems and high degree of security means we’ve been able to create a highly connected network of public providers across the whole state. And we’re able to deliver more accurate results to patients in less time, meaning everyone in the state is benefitting from better clinical outcomes.”
Challenges
- Disconnected labs and workflows over a vast geography
- Skills shortages
- Finite resources available for dealing with increase in testing load
- Testing capacity stretched by outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic
- Virus variants constantly evolving
Benefits
- Secure multi-site analytics providing a complete view of pathology data and samples
- Automated reporting to simplify administration work, statutory reporting, and compliance
- Flexible hosting and architecture adapting to changing demands and future growth
- Robust security and disaster recovery
- Advanced integrations across multiple analyser, clinical and primary care systems in 200+ locations
