When it comes to optimising your performance, one of the key factors is identifying where your time is spent. This goes for the healthcare industry as well. If you can identify which areas of your pathology laboratory takes up the bulk of your processing time and holds your volumes for the longest periods you can take the first step in improving the first pass yield (FPY) and total turnaround time (TAT) of your laboratory.

That brings us to the next phase of our demand focused planning journey. Getting a clear and complete understanding of your time allocation and TAT behaviour and distribution.

As we started leaning towards the laboratory’s TAT analysis in the previous article in our series, Understanding Laboratory Demand, it became apparent that there is a relationship between the arrival volumes and TAT. Increased volumes lead to increased turnaround times. The key is to find the optimal balance, identifying the operational areas where the most time is spent and determining where it is justified and where improvements can be made to optimise the intermediate and overall TAT.

Understanding Laboratory Time Allocation

This article follows from our three part series Harnessing the Power of Laboratory Data and Understanding Laboratory Demand, where we touched on the capabilities of pathology laboratory reporting and how valuable demand forecasting can be in the laboratory’s day to day operation.

Next on our agenda is to discuss the value of the time allocation and TAT features of our Insights report:

Optimising Laboratory Performance

To help us demonstrate, the dashboard above is populated with an anonymised LIS data sample. The first five pages relating to laboratory demand will be discussed in our previous article, Understanding Laboratory Demand. The remaining four pages will now be elaborated on in our final article in this series where we are discussing the value of monitoring and managing your laboratory’s time allocation and turnaround time (TAT) behaviour.

So how does one achieve an optimal throughput yield (TPY)?

By understanding:

• WHERE do your volumes spend their processing time?
• HOW does your test prioritisation and arrival time affect processing time?

WHERE

We answer your WHERE on the Time Allocation and Time Allocation Comparison pages. Identifying where most of the time is spent is easily visible on the waterfall chart. The data shows us that the loaded instrument phase takes up to 70% of the overall processing time. This seems valid since we are provided with timestamps Sample at Lab, Instrument Loaded and First Review indicating that Instrument Loaded is our actual test analysis time. This said, the more detailed the recorded timestamps, the more value you can obtain to support planning and informed decision making.

The Time Allocation pages also gives insight into the average TAT of categories:

• Sample Origin
• Test
• Priority

HOW

Next we address the HOW. The TAT Behaviour and TAT Distribution provides an overview of how the TAT is distributed and affected by the time of day. Indicating when and where there is a peak in TAT can assist in identifying resource constraints, unexpected bottlenecks and scheduling and operating hour influences. As an example, the anonymised data set indicates a peak in TAT in the morning after a shift was changed and no processing took place. Indicating that there may be a volume build up resulting in longer TAT to produce the FPY.

The TAT is brought under further analysis in the TAT Distribution page where some insight is provided on TAT performance by:

• Test Volume
• Day of Week
• Test
• Priority

These are valuable measures as mentioned, increased volume can become a constraint if sufficient resources are not available to process the arrival or can become a bottleneck and logistical hindrance if supplies and reagents were not adequately planned for. Getting a full understanding of our arrival volumes and TAT is crucial in your journey to demand focused planning.

By identifying the rends and behavioural patterns of your laboratory you can safely and confidently plan ahead.

Understanding the Past, Predicts the Future 

Being able to answer all your laboratory performance related questions from a single source of truth gives you the upper hand on your volume arrival and processing times. Benefitting your laboratory, your staff and ultimately the patients.

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