Salem Health earns national lab honor
07 Apr 2024Efficiencies save $4 million while improving service
By: Karl Kamper, systems director for Clinical Support Operations
This group represents just 30% of Salem Health’s lab staff. |
The Medical Laboratory Observer magazine — an industry journal for lab professionals since 1969 — named Salem Health’s Laboratory Services Lab of the Year 2024.
Our staff constantly work to increase efficiency, which improves patient care. The real credit goes to our 226 co-workers led by lab services director Jamie Rouse. Here are two of the many improvements we submitted in our nomination:
We stood out for our commitment to improvement. Labs across the country were judged on achievement in five areas: Customer service, productivity, teamwork, education and training, and strategic outlook.
At West Valley Hospital, the lab often scrambled to have blood products available for transfusion for patient appointments at the infusion and wound clinic. That success rate averaged 70 percent. After using Teams chat to improve communication, the rate grew to 100 percent.
At Salem Hospital, the inpatient phlebotomy team worked together to predict the resources needed for AM rounds specimen collection. They improved on-time completion of AM rounds from 66% of the time to 98% of the time.
Improvements also saved money. In fact, all staff quality projects combined saved Salem Health Laboratories more than $4 million last year.