The Health Protection Agency - HPA-eLab

Online Laboratory Test Requesting & Report Delivery System

One of the Health Protection Agency's responsibilites is performing approximately 1,000 individual laboratory tests a day for NHS hospitals nation-wide, as well as for private and overseas, paying hospitals, which either don't have the capacity or the technology required to perform the tests themselves.
These tests are initiated by a request form that is sent via the Royal Mail. The test is then performed and the generated report is sent back via Royal Mail to the requesting hospital. In the most optimistic scenario, this whole process takes approximately three days.

In 2009, the Health Protection Agency approached The Plumtree Group after seeing their successful "DartOCM" system in use at several NHS hospitals and GP surgeys.
Impressed with the decrease in result turnaround these locations were now seeing as a direct result of implementing the electronic order commincations softare "DartOCM", The HPA requested consultation over implementing a similar system at their Centre For Infections headquarters; where most of the daily lab testing is performed.

I was appointed as the senior consultant from The Plumtree Group and after several meetings, conference calls and demonstrations with the appointed HPA board, we concluded that although the existing "dartOCM" product could deliver 80% of what they wanted to achieve "out of the box", it would better suite the HPA's current and future needs if they instead purchased the "dartEDM" product (An Electronic Document Management System used extensively within the NHS) and Plumtree Group would heavily customise it so that we could achieve 100% of the HPA's current requirements and be better placed to be able provide any future enhancements or alterations they required.

With an agreement in place, I spent the next two months liasing with both the HPA and our own senior development team responsible for the dartEDM product, creating & proofing a full product specification for the new system; to be called "HPA-eLab". I was initially then allocated to a different product as senior consultant, but because of my heavy involvement with the HPA, and the HPA board's desire to keep me involved with their project, I was instead given the role of lead developer for this project.

My first task was to generate a full set of technical specifications for the three main areas of the new project; namely Requesting, Printing and Uploading.
With these specifications in place and signed off by both Plumtree Group and HPA, a small team of two developers and myself began development, against a deadline of the 31st December 2009. During the course of the development cycle, HPA made several significant changes to the specifications that, on occasion, required us to rewrite entire sections of the project from scratch. Because of this, the deadline was pushed back until 1st March 2010.

The project was eventually delivered and available for beta testing by the HPA in October 2009 as planned, but because of changes in personel and other complications within the HPA, they were unable to deliver the product to the beta-testing clients as originally planned. Instead, they decided to make the system "live" on the 1st of November 2009 after briefly testing it internally, and then roll it out to an additional 100 of their customers at the start of every following month. Whilst there were a few small issues discovered during the first months of usage, mainly with the complicated print-distribution section of the product, the HPA board were very pleased and impressed with both the speed and the accuracy of the new system.
In July 2010, the HPA performed a customer satisfaction survey for the 1,000 customers now signed up to use the system. The results that came back indicated that all 1,000 of the customers were happy with the system. Whilst some offered suggestions for future improvements, most were mainly impressed with the speed in which they were now able to get their test results back. On average, Hospitals and GP's were now waiting just 12 hours for their results to come back, compared to the 72 to 96 hours they previously had to wait.

At the time of writing, the HPA-eLab system is now in use by over 200,000 of the HPA's customers and there are talks underway about implementing a secondary service at all of the HPA's satelite laboratories.