Owensboro Regional Health

Owensboro Regional Health is located in Owensboro, Kentucky. The laboratory serves patients in the surrounding areas, including western Kentucky and southern Indiana. To help support its daily volume of 5,000 tests, the laboratory uses two DxC 700 AU chemistry analyzers, two DxH 800 hematology analyzers, one DxI 600 immunoassay analyzer and DxONE Inventory Manager.

Challenge:

The task of manually counting individual reagent boxes required 1 to 1.5 days a week of the core laboratory supervisor’s time. To optimize resources, Owensboro Regional Health looked to eliminate its manual inventory management and reduce administrative workload by automating laboratory reagent inventory management.

Solution:

To help achieve its goals, the laboratory integrated DxONE Inventory Manager into its workflow.

DxONE Inventory Manager is an automated, end-to-end software solution that simplifies inventory control tasks. At its core, DxONE is a cloud-based technology that improves efficiency, saves time and ensures reagents are available when needed, for:

• Real-time, at-a-glance supply-level viewing
• Barcoded product tracking
• Three-step supply reordering

Results:

After implementing DxONE Inventory Manager, Owensboro Regional Health was able to reduce time spent on inventory management activities from a minimum of 8 hours to between 30–60 minutes. These tasks, which included manually counting individual reagent boxes, previously required one or more days. This saved up to 11 hours a week. (See Figure 1.)

	Time Spent on Inventory-related Administrative Tasks Per Week
Before DxONE Inventory Manager
After DxONE Inventory Manager
Hours
	Figure 1. DxONE Inventory Manager saves time spent on laboratory reagent inventory management by reducing the need for manual counts.

The reclaimed time has been reallocated to enable laboratory management to focus on more critical operational tasks.

With the time savings, the laboratory gained the ability to:

• Review metrics to evaluate laboratory performance
• Give greater attention to quality control and keeping systems running optimally
• Perform timely calibrations to ensure TATs are met
• Evaluate procedures to identify opportunities for improvement

By optimizing resource management, the laboratory was able to: 

• Save space by reducing the amount of stored inventory
• Mitigate disruption and waste from unaccounted-for product expirations
• Increase technologist's interest in and awareness of laboratory inventory supplies through automated barcode scanning

Through value-increasing initiatives, Owensboro Regional Health was able to:

• Create more space to add tests to the laboratory’s menu
• Dedicate more time to research tests that could bring the greatest value to the laboratory