How to Deliver Faster Critical Lab Results

Minutes—or even seconds—can mean the difference between a healthy patient and a sentinel event. In the case of critical lab results, that means they need to be delivered to the responsible party as fast as possible. 

Shrinking this delivery time doesn’t just impact patient care. It also expedites care team communication and helps to improve clinician satisfaction. 

Let’s look at how the Hospital for Special Surgery (HSS) undertook a project to streamline the delivery of critical lab results to accelerate communication workflows, boost patient satisfaction, and lend a hand to providers. 

Hospital for Special Surgery: Lab Result Challenges 

In 2019, HSS set out to improve communication across 175 clinics and acute care settings. With 3,500 users sharing devices and juggling clinical tasks, locating the right provider and delivering messages quickly was a daily challenge. The use of pagers and voicemail only exacerbated the challenge. 

Patient risk was an important consideration, particularly when communication delays could impact processes like the delivery of critical lab results. In fact, HSS identified this exact workflow as one that was ripe for improvement. 

Here’s how the process used to work: After verifying a result, the lab would message the provider to review it in the EHR, but HSS policy required live verbal confirmation, meaning voicemails weren’t allowed. Depending on the ordering provider’s availability—maybe they were in surgery, for example—the process could take minutes or even hours. 

If the ordering provider was unavailable, the lab had to consult the on-call schedule, hoping it was up to date. Even after reaching a provider, it was difficult to confirm if the result had been received and properly acted upon. 

HSS turned to PerfectServe’s advanced workflow capabilities to bolster the process. They had been using PerfectServe’s enterprise Clinical Collaboration solution to streamline communication and improve speed to care, so they trusted the technology to transform the delivery of critical lab results with similar success.

Critical Lab Results: How Acting Quickly Improves Care 

Delivering critical lab results improves patient care through:  

• Quicker diagnosis and treatment of acute or life-threatening issues 
• Reduced anxiety while waiting for lab results
• Improved patient trust in their care teams 

Expedited critical lab results benefit both patients and the care teams who treat them. A faster lab-delivery process benefits clinicians by: 

• Enhancing the clinical decision-making process by alleviating unnecessary delays
• Increasing care efficiency to reduce staff burden
• Improving resource allocation so staff can care for patients based on urgency
• Reducing the risk for errors due to a lack of answers

How to Expedite Critical Lab Results 

HSS expanded PerfectServe’s solution footprint to take advantage of the time-saving clinical alerts integration. This connection between PerfectServe, the EHR, and the laboratory information system (LIS) enables rapid and secure delivery of a patient’s critical or abnormal test results. PerfectServe dynamically routes these results to the correct care team member and escalates the notification if the intended recipient doesn’t respond within a certain period of time.

Other elements of this integration include message delivery time stamps, read receipts, and message acknowledgments. When the responsible party receives the message, they have to select “Accept” or “Reject,” after which the loop is closed (in the case of a provider accepting responsibility) or the message continues along its escalation path until someone else takes responsibility (in the case of a provider selecting “Reject” or not answering within the predetermined timeframe).

In the worst-case scenario where nobody responds, the message can make its way back to the lab as a failsafe. All of this functionality provides clarity as the critical result message makes its way through its pre-mapped communication workflows. 

Because of this integration, HSS lab techs no longer have to search through the internal system for phone or pager numbers to contact the right provider, and there’s no more waiting around for a return call (that may not come). Once a result is returned in the LIS, PerfectServe seamlessly delivers it to the right person in seconds.

Improving Communication Workflows to Improve Care Delivery 

In the amount of time it takes for a lab tech to dial a provider’s number, PerfectServe now automatically determines who the appropriate provider is and sends them the alert—all within one screen, and in a message format that gives the provider all the relevant patient context they need to understand the situation. 

After implementation, HSS looked at 1,100 critical lab alerts and noted an average 42% improvement in acknowledgment times. Further analysis showed a 92% compliance rate for 2,685 results. The fastest turnaround time for this process—from appearing in the LIS to being acknowledged in PerfectServe—was just seven seconds. Similarly, hematology saw 84% compliance for 856 results, with a fastest turnaround time of eight seconds.

As the data suggests, this integration completely transformed the delivery of critical lab results at HSS. What used to be a somewhat slow, manual process is now a fully automated—and highly reliable—process. 

Software for Faster Healthcare Lab Results 

In a matrixed hospital environment like HSS, PerfectServe can reduce time to treatment in many areas—not just with critical lab results. This improves the quality of care and patient satisfaction across the board while also reducing care team toil. 

By integrating with other clinical, IT, and telecom systems to create automated workflows, PerfectServe allows nurses and lab technicians to focus on patients by removing the burden of tracking down physicians. 

With PerfectServe, providers no longer have to deal with constant pages, phone calls, or time-consuming searches through the EHR to find lab results. Instead, they can access the information they need directly from their PerfectServe inbox, enabling them to act swiftly and efficiently. By removing these common hurdles, PerfectServe helps reduce frustration, minimize burnout, and ultimately support provider retention. 

Download the HSS case study to read more about their story.