Bumrungrad International Hospital creates first digital microbiology laboratories.

This includes the digitization of its core laboratory, handling 60-70% of its annual tests.

Bumrungrad International Hospital has created Thailand's first fully digital microbiology laboratories, according to an announcement. The deployment includes the digitization of Bumrungrad’s core laboratory, which handles 60-70% of the hospital’s five million annual tests on around one million samples.

Currently, very few microbiology labs have fully digitized their operations due to workflow complexity and lack of electronic medical record (EMR) systems that support end-to-end lab processes or integrated workflows used in microbiology labs.

The hospital has been using InterSystems’ TrakCare® Lab Enterprise, which integrates patient data within the EMR for improved clinical support and patient-centered workflows, and captures comprehensive operational data.

The digitization follows Bumrungrad’s go-live with the InterSystems TrakCare unified healthcare information system in October 2018 to support world-class care delivery throughout the hospital.

As a core function, microbiology labs culture and identify microbes and test their susceptibility to antibiotics to establish the best treatments for patients. To digitize this process, Bumrungrad created a decision tree to map its microbiology workflows and TrakCare Lab Enterprise was configured to support them.

The product’s interoperability capabilities were also used to integrate with the BD EpiCenter™ microbial identification and VITEK® antibiotic susceptibility systems via standard HL7 messaging. TrakCare Lab Enterprise now digitally manages the entire end-to-end testing process.

“The primary outcome is improved service delivery—making it easier for clinicians to deliver care, having confidence in the results with no transcription errors, and reporting results in a much more timely way,” said Jeremy Ford, Laboratory Research and Technology Director for Bumrungrad.

Bumrungrad said it will roll out further enhancements to TrakCare Lab Enterprise in its surgical pathology and referral laboratories later this year, with the blood bank following in early 2021, making all lab processes fully digital and paperless.