Roche has announce that it is providing a Point of Care (POC) Managed Laboratory Service (MLS) to the Royal Liverpool and Broadgreen University Hospitals NHS Trust, the Liverpool Heart and Chest Hospital NHS Trust and the Liverpool Women’s NHS Foundation Trust.
Via this POC MLS agreement (one of the first of its kind in the UK), Roche is providing a new, fully connected POC glucose testing service across all three sites that will help the Trusts to meet new and on-going Clinical Pathology Accreditation (LTD) requirements with regards to POC glucose testing. The managed service covers 185 wirelessenabled Accu-Chek Inform II blood glucose meters, which will be located in four hospitals across the three sites in Liverpool. Connectivity to the laboratory information system (and ultimately to the hospital information systems) is achieved via wireless connection. Kath Ashton, POC testing manager for the Blood Sciences Department at the Royal Liverpool and Broadgreen University Hospitals NHS Trust, has responsibility for the management of the new blood glucose testing service. “Previously, we used handheld glucose meters with no connectivity,” she explained. “Performing nearly half a million tests every year, monitoring internal quality control and external quality assessment of glucose testing was extremely labour intensive, involving bimonthly audits on each instrument. Our managed service agreement with Roche has allowed us to upgrade our meters to have full connectivity, so that audit trails are now provided automatically – from the requesting of tests to the reporting of results, including user identification and training status, patient identification, internal quality control and external quality control results.” “Wireless connectivity will remove the potential risk of transcription errors in the reporting of results,” she continued, “and allows me to monitor the quality control status of each instrument centrally. This saves significant costs in terms of time and effort.”
