Real-time tracing system keeps precious patient samples safe

GCRS-STAR HKWC Pioneer Team
Queen Mary Hospital

When patients undergo surgery or invasive procedures, healthcare professionals routinely collect specimens such as gastric tissue for testing. If these precious specimens are lost, however, patients may need to undergo additional medical procedures. In an initiative that has greatly reduced the risk of loss, Queen Mary Hospital (QMH) teamed up with the Information Technology and Health Informatics (IT&HI) Division of the Hospital Authority Head Office to establish Generic Clinical Request System - Specimen Tracking and Acknowledgement Record (GCRS-STAR). The new arrangement closely monitors the pathway of patient specimens in real time and feeds data into the Clinical Management System (CMS).

Central Portering Team members have to scan a specimen box code and staff card when they collect and deliver a specimen, with the information stored by the CMS. Specimens should usually arrive at the laboratory within 120 minutes, and the system will automatically send out alerts to respective colleagues by email and HA Chat if a specimen is not delivered on time. A team spokesperson recalls, “on one occasion, we received an alert and immediately searched for the specimen according to the delivery time and location logged in the CMS. We eventually found the specimen had been returned to the sender. That was a very successful demonstration of the benefits of early tracing.”

The system was piloted at QMH’s Endoscopy Centre in April last year and has since been extended to operating theatres, as well as to Tung Wah Hospital and the Duchess of Kent Children’s Hospital at Sandy Bay, making transfers of specimens between the three hospitals possible. Over the past year, 42,000 specimens from more than 17,000 patients were tracked, and none were lost. “In the past, manual documentation could lead to human errors,” the Team explains. “IT&HI broke through all the barriers by connecting the CMS, the Laboratory Information System, and the Automatic Dispatching System, providing a comprehensive overview of transaction records. GCRS-STAR offers ease of use with a high level of efficiency and is greatly appreciated by our colleagues.”

The Team believes that there is always a solution. The successful implementation of GCRS-STAR at QMH is a blueprint for other hospitals and has been extended to the New Territories East and New Territories West Clusters to further raise standards of patient safety.

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