Laboratory Director at Duly Health and Care

Elana Postawa

‘Show me the data.’ If you ask the leaders on my team what phrase I use repeatedly – it would be summed up into this statement, reminiscent of 1996 Jerry Maguire. I can’t stress enough how critical it is to mine the proper data sets and transform those data sets into a story about your bottom line within the clinical laboratory. Being able to do so effectively sets the stage for effective strategic planning and efficient operations.

Acquiring Valid Data

In a clinical laboratory setting, often getting the data is the largest hurdle. If your organization has a team that can mine data and build dashboards in Tableau or Power BI, you are ahead of the game. These tasks are time-consuming and require a strong collaboration between IT and the Lab Team. The IT team needs to understand what types of data are needed by the laboratory and the laboratory team needs to consult on what is needed and how it should be presented, as well as what metrics to tie into dashboards to make them useful. If you are lacking these resources, look to your LIS team or vendor to discover what type of reporting options, or data mining options you can come up with. If the LIS has robust reporting such as slicer and dicer in EPIC, you may not need to worry about mining raw data. If your LIS has minimal reporting capabilities, you should consider raw data mining each week or each month that you can filter in excel and create pivot tables, etc. Usually, these data sets are large and take a lot of time to manipulate so there is a downside to this method, especially in a laboratory with lean staffing. We’ve all heard the phrase ‘junk in, junk out,’ whichever your chosen solution makes sure your data is correct and validated, otherwise it’s not going to provide a true picture for your story.

“Clinical Laboratory leaders need to use data to tell the story of their laboratory to achieve strategic goals and become more efficient in operations.”

Quality Metrics         

Use data to visualize departmental goals and metrics. Doing so is a great way to keep teams on track and up to date as well as share with Senior and Executive leadership. For example, my team currently monitors the time it takes a laboratory technologist to report a critical result. Our current goal is to have 90% of critical reports called to the correct provider and clinic within 30 minutes of receiving the critical result. Through Power BI we can mine data from our EPIC Beaker LIS. The system can capture the time the specimen arrives in the laboratory and compare it to the time the critical result comment is added into the LIS. Power BI is programmed to use a 30-minute turnaround time in conjunction with the specified parameters.

Physician Inquiries

Every now and then clinical laboratories receive inquiries from physicians or other members of the clinic or hospital team. It may seem like potassium values are running high, or they are getting an overabundance of abnormal results across their patients for one specific test. In these instances, the data that we mine as a laboratory is integral for reviewing results and providing follow up to physicians and other colleagues. For example, if a physician reports they are seeing high potassium results in their patient population at x site, my team and I have quick access to data for a specific clinic location or hospital unit, for only potassium results, even only for that doctor depending on how granular of data is needed. If it’s an issue with testing though, we would want to look at all results from a specific location for all ordering physicians to rule out an issue with instrumentation or specimen collection. In our system this appears as raw data that must be manipulated (due to the size of the data). The raw data can be pulled right out of Power BI and quickly transformed into a graph to review the spread of the results over a pre-determined period .