Piramal Diagnostic Services is a Pathology & Radiology Center chain from pharmaceutical major Piramal Healthcare. They provide advanced diagnostic facility under one roof. X-Ray, MRI, CT-scan, blood and other pathology tests can be conducted in the laboratories and their reports are sent to the various centers.
The turnaround time for test reports was long and in cases where tests reports were required urgently, this manual process of sending the results of the test was causing delays in diagnosis. Not only was there delay in giving reports to patients but there were also instances where doctors were not aware of the status of lab tests. Tracing the samples sent for tests was also an issue for the organization. To counter these problems, the organization decided to implement a Laboratory Information System.

IT solution
While implementing the Laboratory Information System there were few challenges that Piramal Diagnostics had to face. Since all medical equipment were to be integrated with the software, interfacing using HL7 or RS32 protocols was a technical challenge. Also maintaining unique master, service master, normal range records for tests was an important accomplishment achieved during this implementation. Post implementation the process has become automated from a manual and error-prone process. Since, data transfer about a test result takes place directly from the medical equipment to the LIS application. manual entries no longer happen thereby eliminating chances of error. Also the doctors can authenticate reports online by giving their digital signatures.
In future, Piramal Diagnostic wants to develop a patient service module on top of this LIS solution through which the patient would be able to take his report online by logging in to a website.

Project  Specs
Deployment Location:  Mumbai and 35 labs across India
Team Size:  6
Tech Used:  IBM x3400 server, Microsoft Windows 2003 server, SQL Server 2005
Expected life: Life-long with updates

Implementation Partner: 21st Century Healthcare Solutions