If you just like the sound of that phrase, like I do, check out Dr. Bruce Friemdan’s blog LabSoftNews where he discussed a seminar dedicated to improving surgical pathology workflow.
Dr. Friedman is well known in the field of informatics and is part of the inspiration for this blog. He has put together the Lab InfoTech Summit, a meeting hosted annually in Las Vegas and scheduled for April 9-11, 2008.
I’m not sure that adding an assistant and reducing distractions are surprising methods for improving efficiency, although it’s nice to see that someone is actually -doing- it. What I’d really like to see is whether this would -work- in an academic setting with residents involved, as academic turnaround times already (by my impression) tend to lag. We have “protected” lecture time, why not “protected” sign-out time?
The case “point” system seems to be a new fad, but I think brings problems along with promise. Among these are that different pathologists are going to weigh different cases/specimens differently. A locally derived point system runs the risk of 9 pathologists with no interest or extra expertise in, say, placental pathology sets a low value for placental cases, while 1 placental pathologist spends more time & effort. In a practice that brings in the point system to address internal disagreements regarding who’s doing more/less work, but then assigns those points itself based on its own pre-existing biases, superficially it does not appear to fill its intended function. A point system derived by national organizations partly addresses this, but, obviously, fails to address issues specific to a given individual practice. In a a practice with complete internal agreement, using it as an accounting method for streamlining does make sense.
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