The most asked ques­tion in our line of work tends to be ‘Which lab can per­form this test?’.

Until recent­ly, it wasn’t easy to answer.

We had inher­it­ed sep­a­rate sys­tems where tests were described and report­ed in dif­fer­ent ways. There was no easy way to tell which labs per­formed which test with­out mak­ing inquiries.

Our Pre and Post Ana­lyt­i­cal Stream iden­ti­fied the need for a sin­gle source of truth.

Pre and Post Ana­lyt­ics direc­tor Judy Kemp­ton-Webb, Cat­a­logue Project Offi­cer Hui Ger­mon, and a small but excep­tion­al­ly cre­ative DevOps team set to work to design and cre­ate it.

For Hui this meant the Her­culean task of col­lect­ing and col­lat­ing a sea of test infor­ma­tion from every cor­ner of our organisation.

After exten­sive nego­ti­at­ing, pilot­ing and test­ing, our NSW Health Pathol­o­gy Test Cat­a­logue was launched in August 2021.

It pro­vides accu­rate test infor­ma­tion for clin­i­cians, col­lec­tors, spec­i­men recep­tion staff and sci­en­tists across NSW.

Avail­able 24/7, the user-friend­ly online plat­form can be accessed from mobile or desk­top devices. It also pro­vides use­ful links, guid­ance around col­lec­tion meth­ods, trans­port and han­dling, and patient advice.

The cor­ner­stone of our elec­tron­ic mes­sag­ing strat­e­gy, it sup­ports Fusion, the Path­Works Mobile app, our new web­site and statewide billing ser­vice, with more to come.

It has more than 3800 active users and receives more than 200,000 test enquiries a month. 

Now all of us can answer sim­ple ques­tions about our tests safe­ly and accurately.