Pathology Tracker News

Consider this: When you order a product from a retail site like Amazon.com, you receive an email notifying you when your order was received, when it was shipped and when it will be in your mailbox — and you can track it throughout this delivery cycle. Why can’t you do the same with your pathology report?

Diagnostic errors are a significant type of health care-associated harm,1 reported to affect 1 in 20 outpatient adults.2 These errors are responsible for $34 billion

A guiding principle of laboratory medicine is to reduce preanalytic, analytic, and postanalytic sources of error to continuously improve patient care. Laboratories that provide high-quality and reliable results address analytic and postanalytic sources of error directly, but preanalytic errors (eg, specimen mislabeling or loss), which are the largest source of risk in laboratory testing, frequently occur outside of the laboratory domain.

A practice management system, Complete.MD, adopted the RFID technology in their “Pathology Tracker” software module to track certain laboratory specimens processed by 1 of their 8 pathology laboratories (the other 7 laboratories did not use the RFID technology).8,9 The goal of adopting the RFID technology was to improve order tracking, specimen processing, and test result communication to clinicians and patients. Both RFID tracked and non–RFID tracked orders were processed through the Pathology Tracker by these laboratories.