LAUSR

Application of lean process management strategies to process improvement in clinical and anatomic pathology laboratories afford opportunities to enhance workflow process to lower costs and simultaneously to improve patient safety. Bar-codes are now employed in most modern anatomic pathology laboratories to track specimens from the clinicians' office or the operating room all through the continuum of service to specimen disposal. In order to enhance patient safety and workload optimization strategies, novel computer hardware and software assets are being developed to enable monitoring, analysis, and improvement of specimen workflow and diagnostic accuracy. More recently, data warehouse technologies from the retail industry have been optimized to permit high-throughput analysis of granular data in the laboratory arena. These optimize mass-data analysis in real time in the information technology space. In this review we describe the application of an in-house designed data warehouse to the anatomic pathology assets of a large regional reference laboratory.