Remote performance monitoring supports analyzer uptime

Get support in monitoring your analyzers remotely

The University Hospital of Wales is a major 1080-bed hospital in the Heath district of Cardiff, Wales. It is Europe’s first fully integrated hospital and medical school. It is also the third largest university hospital in the UK.

At the University Hospital of Wales, Mark Saunders and Chris Evans are integral members of the point-of-care (POC) team. Mark is the lead biomedical scientist in the automated area. He manages point-of-care testing concerning blood gas. His responsibilities include daily maintenance and upkeep of analyzers and training of lab staff.

His colleague, Chris Evans, the Deputy Pathology IT Manager, manages the IT systems. Chris works alongside Mark with the configurations they need.

Mark and Chris spoke with us about their journey with LIVE Connect— a service that helps you partner with Radiometer to reduce analyzer downtime and remain compliant.

About the hospital

University Hospital of Wales, UK

ABL800 series, ABL80 FLEX, Radiance, LIVE Connect

1080 beds

Contacts: Mark Saunders, Lead Biomedical Scientist in the automated area, and Chris Evans, Deputy Pathology IT Manager

The need for an ongoing monitoring of analyzers

Prior to installing LIVE Connect, Mark and his POC team, visited the wards at the start of every day shift. If any issues arise later in the day, they would rely on ward staff to contact them to fix it.

This worked out okay, "but occasionally," Mark added, "we had issues that were reported at the end of the day shift. So there's challenges to that. There's a handover to a reduced staff service because the work would tail off into the evening."

Mark Saunders, Lead Biomedical Scientist in the automated area and Chris Evans, Deputy Pathology IT Manager.

The challenge is that we do some preventive maintenance at the beginning of the day. However, anyone can come along and clot up the analyzer afterwards, anything can happen. And we don't know anything unless they contact us, so we haven't really got a pulse of the situation. You haven't got an ongoing monitoring of the analyzers.

- Mark Saunders, Lead Biomedical Scientist in the automated area

A continuous drive to deliver service excellence

When LIVE Connect became available to the University of Wales Hospital, Mark and his team could see the obvious benefits. In the process of installation, the POC team hoped to achieve "decreasing analyzer downtime and a more efficient way of maintaining the service," Mark says.

For Chris, "Security is our major concern, dealing with patient information. With LIVE Connect, we supplied Radiometer with security regulations and the correct IP addresses. And the fact that LIVE Connect only requires outbound traffic helped massively get it accepted into our IT security policy."

With everything in place, LIVE Connect was ready to be installed to support the hospital.

Remote performance monitoring with LIVE Connect

One of LIVE Connect’s salient features is remote performance monitoring, which provides the Radiometer Medical Service Engineer the potential to spot errors and further support the POC coordinator (POCC).

Mark tells such a story, when "one example recently, Tony, the Medical Service Engineer, alerted us to one analyzer showing frequent calibration drift errors. We weren't aware of this. Tony informed us and he proactively found a solution."

He adds, "the analyzer performance was monitored remotely from that point on to ensure the fault was corrected satisfactorily and saved a phone call and staff time from the lab."

The feature of remote monitoring helped the POC team discover a challenge that they did not know they had. Moreover, Tony was able to provide services proactively in solving the issue.

One thing that’s good for monitoring with LIVE Connect is that on our satellite labs, you can’t be everywhere at all times. So it’s quite reassuring to know there’s good uptime on our satellite sites as well, without actually being there to physically look at the machines.

- Mark Saunders, Lead Biomedical Scientist in the automated area

That extra reassurance with remote performance monitoring

The POCC at the hospital is assured that both the team and the Radiometer Medical Services Engineer monitor analyzers with LIVE Connect. Mark points out that "We can't be there at all times. We’ve got this in the background as an extra sort-of safety net thing to keep analyzers running."

Contact your local Radiometer representative for more information about LIVE Connect.