Have you ever wondered how much a ticket costs? How many tickets do you handle? And how much could your lab efficiency increase if you digitize them?
We have tried to calculate the average time it takes for the laboratory analyst of a well-known pharmaceutical industry (our client) to carry out the printing, manipulation and management of the ticket of a weigh on a scale (including the times to reach the logbook near to the instrument). The paper flow, following the ticket issue, is particularly complex and consists of the following steps:
- the analyst must note the reference to the sample on the ticket, plus the date and the instrument ID if missing, then sign the print and fix it to his notebook or analytical sheet;
- the notebook, or the analytical sheet, must then undergo a process of data review and approval, by adding a further signature to attest this revision;
- it could be necessary to verify that the daily checks of the calibration status has been carried out and, for this purpose, the operator needs to access the instrument’s logbook by physically reaching its storage location;
- some results must then be transcribed, presumably in the computerized analysis management system for the generation of the analytical certificate (LIMS, ERP, ELN, …);
- finally, the notebook, or the analytical sheet, must be stored and controlled in an adequate physical space for the entire storage period (at least 5-10 years).
The total time for these activities is around 21 minutes per ticket.
A few months ago, our client introduced Ioi, our middleware able to digitalize the long and laborious process just seen, in the laboratory. In this way, Ioi made it possible to overcome the Data Integrity gaps of simple laboratory instruments, by capturing the measurements generated and integrating them with all the necessary metadata. In other words, Ioi digitalizes the tickets, because it stores the measurements and the related metadata in a secure database.
We have calculated the times once again, this time with the use of Ioi, and the result has been surprising.
By digitizing the work flow, we registered a significative improvement of the time needed for the management of the digitalized ticket: it took about 11 minutes to take the measurement, all in compliance with Data Integrity.
As mentioned, it is probably a particularly complex case, but we can causiously assume, as a rough estimate, that we can save 4 minutes for each ticket to note it down, attach it, recover it for reviewing and approving it and then store it.
At this point one wonders: how many tickets do we generate in the laboratory? And how much can we save in the medium-long term?
Those who don’t have middleware in their labs are usually unable to make estimates: <<There is little time to count how many measurements are made in a lab>>.
But another result that our client has obtained thanks to Ioi is the ability to quantify the measurements that his laboratory makes, both for the 20 instruments that he has integrated with Ioi, and for each of them. Considering that our client performed about 14,000 measurements in six months, multiplying them by 4 (the minutes saved), we understand that 933 hours of work were saved.
The implementation of Ioi represents a benefit over the ever-increasing amount of compliance required, but more importantly, it gives analysts the ability to focus on analysis rather than (albeit essential) documentation.