Histology Tissue Tracking

Software and hardware systems are the main source of how companies are ran today. To remain influential in today’s markets, businesses must remain flexible, and technology integrated. The implications of not acquiring up-to-date technology may be the demise of a company as a whole. While remaining technology up-to-date can cut cost, and implement the highest productivity of a company helping insure satisfied customers. Business requirements thus, drive businesses to change the way production, and customer satisfaction is met.

During the integrations of a computerized tissue tracking system needed for irreplaceable patient pathology specimens, a greater need was understood in the implications of tracking. Handwritten cassettes were previously used in order to number each cassette holding patients tissue, leaving the risk of human error, and specimen misplacement. This was virtually processed completely manual, minus the completion of patient information data entry.

For the period of the course of gross pathology, a gross technician would retrieve hand written numbered cassettes dedicated to the patients, and the patients tissue from a lab assistant. The gross technician would then dissect, and describe the tissue, recorded by gross transcription; the tissue would then be placed singularly, or into multiple tissue cassettes, depending on need. This process would then lead to the tissue manually loaded, into a tissue processing machine, and latter pulled out of the machine by a histology technician. The histology technician would then manually embed each patient’s dissected tissue into wax, and then placed back into the cassette in which the tissue originally came out of. After this process was completed, the tissue would then b...

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...ion, and diagnosis, or adds orders for histological special staining, send-outs, or a second opinion. At the time the Pathologist has finishes the specific case, the slides are returned to a lab assistant and scanned back into the laboratory’s inventory, through the integrated system. Each scan is tracked, letting all appropriate users know where and when each slide was received at any specific site/person.

This has been a monumental step in creating a better process of irreplaceable specimen tracking. In the future, higher technology should be implemented. Allowing scanning to be tracked from the grossing technician, into the tissue processing machine, this step is vital as tissue can be misplaced in-between this exact step. Leaving the possibilities of irreplaceable tissue to be lost in transit, and patient’s unable to receive a possible life saving diagnosis.