The patient safety passport

Abstract: In the mordern era of digitilisation, the clinical laboratory is no exception either; which is compelled to shoulder a huge responsibility to handle tons of data with sheer confidentiality and privacy; enabling the digital transformation of such data in all forms (textual, numeric, pictorial, graphical) to information with meaningful sense in a language understandable and interpretable by the clinician and his/her aide culminating in arriving at clinical decisions regarding diagnosis, treatment, and follow up of patients’ clinical conditions in applicable scenarios.

Laboratory information management has seen leaps and bounds in its adventurous journey down the lane since 21st century in the form of Information Technology (IT) pitching in & taking centre stage in the modern era of health care. The evolution of information management has had experienced the “fast and furious” in the past decade from Laboratory Information Software (LIS) which enables auto transfer of data from laboratory instruments to the software engine to Artificial intelligence which has been empowered with multiple functionality to plan, think and act smart thereby supplemeting human brains to do a multi level check before releasing each and every information to a patient. This shall be coined as “patient safety passport” which provides an ennormous oppurtunity to reduce the human errors manifold and improving the continuity of services 24/7 ; 365 days a year. This is indeed a Beauty!!!But along with beauty comes a beast. The beast within gets unleashed when the information system goes down for a crash wherein the human brain has to have PDCA (Plan, do, check and Act) to plan for a contingency under such dire circumstances to avoid undue delay or error to avoid compromising patients’ safety.