Major hospital and private technology firm collaborate
A local technology company has created a system that automates much of the procedure involved in blood-testing services at large city hospitals, reducing substantially the need for patients to wait in time-consuming queues.
The system is operating at Bangkok's King Chulalongkorn Memorial Hospital, where blood tests are normally made on about 160,000 people per year. Instead of spending hours waiting for the blood-testing procedure, patients are these days in and out in only 20 minutes - even during rush hours.
The system, developed by private technology company Zenimed (Thailand), has been on trial at King Chulalongkorn Memorial Hospital for about two months. It is a robotic tube-labelling system called "Labe Lon-1", and it aims to reduce the time that patients must wait to have blood drawn as well as reducing human error - making short an otherwise stultifying procedure.
The hospital's assistant director for patient-support services Thewarug Werawatganon said the system had been implemented in a part of the blood laboratory that was designed and developed to work together with the hospital's existing patient-registration system and blood-test service process.
The robotic tube-labelling system is linked to the blood laboratory's patient database, which serves about 160,000 patents a year, or between 500 and 1,000 patients per day. The worst backlogs occur in the blood-test "rush hours", between 7am and 9am every day. The system aims to create a better-quality blood laboratory service and happier patients.
Thewarug said that when patients arrived for blood tests that had been ordered by doctors, their hospital numbers and a list of required blood tests were keyed into the database system.
The robotic tube-labelling system receives information on each patient from the database system and selects the blood tubes according to the nature of tests required. At the same time a printer - also linked with database system - prints a barcode label carrying the patient's name, hospital number and tests required.
The robotic system picks up the barcode labels and pastes them on the tubes it has selected, then places the tubes in a blanket, which it puts on a conveyor belt for delivery to the blood-drawing counter.
Nurses at the counter pick up the blanket and use a barcode reader to display the patient's information - both personal information and blood-test orders - on an LCD screen installed on the counter. At the same time, the patient's queue number appears on a display and he or she is called to the counter.
"This process is entirely automatic and it helps to reduce the time patients must take, especially during the morning rush hours, when the robotic tube-labelling system can substantially improve the flow of patients. Patients spend only 20 minutes from the time they contact the registration counter until their blood is drawn. At normal times, they spend less than 10 minutes waiting," Thewarug said.
The robotic tube-labelling system can paste barcode labels on to as many as 1,440 tubes per hour. Moreover, the system can identify what types of tubes - from a total of eight types - are required for each blood test. These include tests for capillary blood glucose, complete blood count, and liver function, and some need tubes designed to prevent the blood from clotting.
Zenimed (Thailand) developed software to enable the system to automatically select the types and numbers of tubes according to the blood tests requested by doctors for each patient.
Zenimed's managing director Niponth Iamkosum said his company had been working with King Chulalongkorn Memorial Hospital to develop the robotic tube-labelling system for two years. It had received Bt300,000 in research-and-development funding support from the National Innovation Agency (NIA).
"We have been developing more robotic tube-labelling systems with the aim of exporting them to overseas markets," he said. "Our system costs less than imported brands. For example, the same system from Japan costs about Bt15 million and it serves only four blood-drawing stations. Ours costs only Bt4 million and it can serve eight blood-drawing stations.
"We are providing this system free to the King Chulalongkorn Memorial Hospital because we want the hospital as our reference site. We also plan to provide this robotic tube-labelling system at three more hospitals in the country," Niponth said.
Zenimed has also developed vacuum tubes that are used to collect and store blood samples. For this work, it received Bt3 million in research-and-development funding from the NIA. The development will enable Thailand to reduce import expenditure. Every year, the country imports about 100 million such tubes, worth nearly Bt500 million.
Via: The Nation
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