During the height of the COVID-19 outbreak, our Point of Care Testing (PoCT) team worked with Clinical Operations to implement over 120 Roche Cobas Liat devices in our laboratories to perform fast turn-around SARS-CoV‑2 testing.
The PoCT team recognised the need to capture, analyse and report data from the Liats to provide insights into testing trends, positivity rates and invalid rates across local health districts and facilities.
Jacob Birdsall, PoCT Coordinator at Royal North Shore Hospital, stepped up and led a project to design, build and implement an automated business intelligence system to present this data in an insightful way.
The Liat Dashboard Jacob developed has provided a real-time solution to give the NSW Health Pathology executive team, PoCT team and laboratory staff valuable insights. This helped to guide decisions about allocating resources such as devices, stock and staffing levels, and to monitor positivity rates across the state.
Monitoring invalid tests by facility and reagent lot number was particularly important as it flagged a faulty batch of cartridges that had a significantly higher error rate than other lots. The dashboard allowed users to identify which hospitals were using the faulty batch, so the issue could be investigated and addressed.
This research project was one of the first interactive, real-time solutions for our statewide PoCT service, providing the ability to extract large amounts of data and present it in one easily accessible location.
The project clearly demonstrates the importance of prescriptive data analytics and business intelligence solutions, and is now being used as a model for the development of future tools.