Biorepository Management System for a major Healthcare Research Organization.

  Overview

Maintaining an adequate flow of essential supplies drives the operation of every successful enterprise. For healthcare and research companies, these supplies can vary from tissue samples, to compounds and molecules, safety materials and other crucial material. Managing the inventory and streamlining the requisition workflow are more than just convenient in such endeavors; they are mandatory. The degree of cooperation between supplier and customer can determine the success or both in this fast paced, competitive environment. The consultants of Discoverture Solutions have extensive experience developing capable solutions that automate the requisition and procurement processes to the mutual benefit of all partners.

  Opportunity Summary

A large Pathology department was facing obstacles in providing a free flow of biological samples from their vendors to their researchers. A non-trivial requisition process for tracking and approving these sample requests was laborious. In addition, the researchers had no access to the catalog of samples available in-house and often reordered expensive duplicate material.

An initial attempt to resolve the problem was made by throwing a database at the problem. This approach failed to take into consideration the daily activities of the researchers, pathologists, histologists and those in shipping and receiving. As a result, the technology was adequate but the system solution was not. We were called in.

  Solution

Providing the correct solution started by going back to all stakeholders and understanding what they needed to accomplish. The resulting Tissue Repository became a substantial enhancement over the existing database application. The application now allows all internal users to search the repository and place orders for samples available in-house or externally from a vendor. As a result, pathologists no longer spend their time responding to sample requests from researchers but are now focused on procuring, preparing and evaluating biological samples and studying the effects of stimuli to these cell tissues.

As personnel from the Pathology department approve orders, the Histology department is automatically notified of their required processing. The system also provides the ability to add images and documents to samples in the repository and categorize them, print barcodes and labels for samples and derivatives, download data into spreadsheets and interface with other systems such as Oracle Clinical and Documentum. This biorepository runs as an intranet application hosted on a Sun Solaris platform.

  Benefits

The new system has now non-invasively embedded the process of tissue search, requisition, ordering and handling into the everyday tasks of Researchers, Pathologists, Histologists and Receiving. As a result, researcher productivity has increased and duplicate sample orders have been minimized. The time required to process shipments and the organization of the samples in their physical cabinets has been systematized. Various reports help optimize the usage of the repository. Adding users in geographically diverse locations is a breeze since the application is web-based.