Patient turnaround time: Concern of medical laboratory scientist

Abstract

When a company that experienced a period of financial recovery, it's called turnaround. It refers to time of recovery of a nation or region's economy after a period of recession or unproductivity. Turnaround time (TAT) is the duration of a process from initiation to completion, which can significantly be improved with an automated workflow solution. Doctors  frequently used TAT as the standard for laboratory performance, way to communicate timelines as, a useful marker of laboratory efficiency, as a quality indicator to evaluate the effectiveness, efficiency of the testing process, and as clinicians and patients' gratifications. Ordinarily, turnaround time (TAT), can be defined as the time interval from the period of start of a process to the time of completion of the same process. It is the total amount of time spent by a process  in the system, which can either be a waiting time or the time for executing the process/task. Since there's no perfect/precise definition of TAT, therefore, different definitions can be used based on the process or task to be carried out. For laboratory personnel, it would be from the time of receipt of sample in laboratory till report is generated after validation. However, it can be characterized based on the investigation pe r formed ( e .g. Ful l Blood Count, Haemoglobin, Potassium), type of patient attended to (e.g. Emergency Department, Intensive Care Unit, Wards, Out Patient Department etc.), degrees of significance (e.g. stat, urgent or routine) and the activities included (e.g. from the time of collation/receipt of sample or from the time of receipt of sample in laboratory). Factors affecting TAT can be grouped into pre-analytical, analytical and post analytical. Adapting to an automated process, tracking of end-to-end process, drafting a more distinct process and multitask trained staffing are the methods to achieve good laboratory TAT.