Harnessing the Power of Real-Time Specimen Tracking

In today’s highly complex medical environment, clinical teams are juggling a number of demanding priorities, including managing financial pressures, navigating high rates of staff turnover, and working with operational leaders to optimize workflows.

But even as they face these logistical challenges, teams are committed to one overarching goal: ensuring safe, high-quality, and timely care for every patient in their service. The backend operations, specimen tracking systems, and supply chain workflows that facilitate clinical work play a critical role in how teams are able to deliver this kind of care. 

After all, when a patient’s diagnosis or life is on the line, a medical specimen’s efficient journey to the lab can make all the difference in their care. 

With patient safety and timely care top of mind, clinical leaders are increasingly adopting advanced specimen tracking solutions to enhance visualization of specimens in transit. Here’s how these solutions can enable clinical teams to do their best work.

What Is Specimen Tracking Software?

As the Mayo Clinic describes, “a patient specimen is a snapshot of a human body at a point in time.” To truly capture that snapshot, however, specimens need to move from the clinical office to the lab efficiently. 

Within that lifecycle, specimens reach several milestones, including processing, staining, diagnostics, reporting, and more — each of which might require a different lab or touchpoint. In other words, the complexity of the lifecycle poses countless opportunities to lose or mishandle specimens. 

Radio-frequency identification (RFID) specimen tracking enables teams to monitor samples in real time throughout the entire lifecycle. According to TechTarget, RFID tracking utilizes the radio frequency of an electromagnetic response to pinpoint an object. When applied to medical specimens, the RFID tags connect with a device via radio waves. The tags send signals through those waves to a homebase antenna, providing teams with accurate and immediate data about the specimen’s location. 

In this way, RFID-backed specimen tracking software ensures full digital visualization of all tagged specimens from end to end. With enhanced visibility, clinical teams can deliver timely and informed patient care, while avoiding costly and detrimental delays or losses. 

Benefits of a Specimen Tracking System 

With the right specimen tracking system, teams can solve common and often pervasive problems that inhibit patient care and safety. Here’s how a specimen tracking system can support better patient care, operations, and workflows. 

Reduce Clinical Errors

Research shows that 45-68% of specimen or laboratory errors happen in the preanalytical phase, which includes obtaining the specimen, transporting it efficiently to a lab, and logging it before analyzing its contents. 

Specimens get mislabeled, mishandled, or lost in transit, which impacts everything from the patient’s timely care to the healthcare organization’s bottom line. But effective RFID-enabled specimen tracking can significantly reduce the number of preanalytical errors. 

In fact, one study found that the implementation of an RFID specimen tracking system reduced mislabeling events from 24 to six within a six-month period. By tagging specimens ensuring accountability to accurate information, and providing more transparent visualization, these solutions save organizations time and resources they’d otherwise spend on spotting and addressing manual errors.

Improve Patient Safety

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) reports that 70% of all medical decisions depend on lab tests, with healthcare providers conducting 14 billion lab tests each year.  

These tests inform both the quality and effectiveness of medical diagnoses and treatment, and errors can be devastating to patient safety. According to one study, around 795,000 people in the U.S. become disabled or die each year from misdiagnosed diseases. 

Digital visualization via an advanced specimen tracking system helps minimize preanalytical errors and improve the efficacy of specimen delivery and processing. When providers and staff can effectively track lab specimens at every stage of their journey, they can help ensure accurate and timely diagnostics that can save lives. 

Speed Up Care

Study after study has shown that timely diagnosis is key to effective treatment. Early intervention and predictive screening can support better, even life-saving care for certain cancers, inflammatory illnesses, Alzheimer's disease, and many other conditions. 

Specimens that are lost, mishandled, or delayed on their way to the lab impede providers’ abilities to deliver the timely care necessary for effective treatment. With specimen tracking, however, organizations can prevent time-consuming errors and immediately address those that occur, saving critical time and supporting better care delivery. 

Minimize Costly Losses 

Financial stressors can put additional pressure on clinical teams. Lost specimens cost organizations an average of $584 per sample, or more than $20,000 every three months, reports Medscape. 

By reducing the number of lost specimens with an enhanced specimen tracking solution, organizations can save considerable costs, while enabling clinical teams to focus more on patient care.

An All-in-One Tracking Solution 

The right specimen tracking solutions can influence all areas of clinical care, from optimizing workflows to improving patient safety to enabling more timely diagnostics. 

Pycube’s Digital Specimen solution combines cutting-edge RFID technology with unparalleled visualization of the multiple steps a specimen takes from the clinical office to the destination lab. Pycube’s solution is: 

• Comprehensive, covering every stage of the specimen lifecycle in real-time.
• Automated, with live digital visualization and no manual upkeep.
• Smart, with AI assistants that ensure the specimen lifecycle happens in lock step with patients’ needs.
• Proactive, with immediate alerts to missing or delayed specimens.
• Streamlined, offering dynamic dashboards that allow teams to locate specimens in real time.
• Easily integrated into existing workflows so teams don’t lose any time during implementation. 

Reach out today to learn more about our advanced specimen tracking solution — and what it can do for your organization.