| POCT, which includes bed side and near patient testing is growing 13 to 17% a year. This growth has posed unique problems for hospitals and clinical laboratories by shifting workflow and quality responsibility to decentralized areas focused on patient care rather than testing disciplines. Compounding the problem is the reality of controlling staffing costs as hospital reimbursement rates continue to decline or hold steady in the best of times.
The POCT Coordinator’s responsibility to ensure compliance of devices and operators increases as new device types from new vendors are deployed through out the hospital. These responsibilities, coupled with the need to capture charges for billing and revenue cost reporting, are increasing the work requirements of the POCT Coordinator to an unrealistic level.
POCT accomplishes the goal of rapid turnaround of results for patient treatment. However, without integrating the data into the patient’s clinical record, the caregivers are deprived of a readily accessible, comprehensive view of all clinical data to support their decision making.
The TELCOR Quick-Linc and QML products successfully address these specialized user requirements. They provide a cost saving way to integrate the data into the Laboratory/Clinical Information System and provide all operator, device, and QC data in a format that reduces the labor needed to monitor and control the POCT program.
Our approach is to provide a scalable solution with an upgrade path that eliminates throw away costs, as well as the redundant costs of maintaining multiple systems with multiple interfaces. A TELCOR client can start with Quick-Linc interfacing one or more POCT vendor’s data management systems to the client’s information system. The client can continue to expand the system with new vendor devices and consolidate the data management functions by upgrading to QML, without replacing any of the functions and cost of the Quick-Linc module.
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