An integral part of laboratory success is continuous quality improvement. Lab leaders may set goals based on revenue, cost savings, safety, turnaround time (TAT) or other performance measures. But how do we recognise areas where we are excelling? How do we identify areas where we are underperforming and need to make a change? 

In the clinical laboratory world, benchmarking allows us to determine our relative performance by comparing certain measures of our work against those same measures in other laboratories. Comparing our labs with others is not always fun, but it can be a wonderful tool for improvement.

Traditional benchmarking, including comparisons of analytic quality control and pre-analytic quality control, will continue to be important, but focus on new measures of quality is beginning to grow.

Benchmarking patient outcomes

One new approach is to benchmark the impact of lab performance on patient outcomes, notes Dr Antonio Leon-Justel, CEO of Huelva University Hospital in Spain.

“We can use our experience in analytic and pre-analytic quality control to develop specific benchmarks for comparing patient outcomes,” says Justel. “I believe this is a new generation for benchmarking in the laboratory.”

Justel notes that it is not always possible to measure every relevant patient outcome, but suggests we should focus first on what can be measured and what is worth measuring. For example, labs may want to measure how early risk identification testing impacts disease prevention or how a timely diagnosis impacts treatment quality. 

Benchmarking patient experience

Beyond patient outcomes, clinical labs should also benchmark their impact on patient experience, according to Dr Elizabeth Frank of Learning 2 Lead Consultants. This includes looking at various factors like wait time and process flow and how that impacts overall satisfaction of patients who use lab services. 

Dr Frank argues that labs can achieve superior patient experience by comparing their performance against other industries, which can provide case studies that are instructive for the lab sector. For example, it might be helpful to look at how clinical labs measure up against the hospitality industry when it comes to staff training or customer service.

“I think the medical field has lagged behind [other industries],” notes Dr Frank. “If we look beyond our immediate competitors, we may find unexpected external partners with whom we can compare, learn, teach and improve.”