Birmingham Children’s Hospital completes development of laboratory
system for newborn blood screening
17 September 2009
Birmingham Children’s Hospital (BCH) has completed a project to
improve laboratory services for screening of newborn babies in the West
Midlands. The Hospital had contracted Winchester-based Integrated
Software Solutions Ltd to implement a key subset of its OMNI-Lab
laboratory management suite.
OMNI-Lab is being used to manage the screening of bloodspots, taken
by heelprick from 70,000 newborn infants collected each year in the West
Midlands region, either to exclude five serious diseases of infancy, or
alert paediatricians to the need for further testing and/or possible
treatment. This is part of the UK Newborn Screening Programme and is
carried out in conjunction with 12 other centres of excellence
nationwide, including Great Ormond Street Children’s Hospital, where
OMNI-Lab is already in use.
The UK National Screening Committee recommends that all babies in the
UK are offered screening for phenylketonuria (PKU), congenital
hypothyroidism (CHT), sickle cell disorders (SCD), cystic fibrosis (CF)
and medium-chain acyl-CoA dehydrogenase deficiency (MCADD).
Identified early enough and with the right medication and follow-up
during the early years, the impact of these conditions on the affected
children can be greatly reduced or even eliminated. It is therefore
vital that tests done on bloodspots indicating the possible presence of
any of the conditions during the screening process are acted upon
immediately and accurately, which is where OMNI-Lab comes in.
The newborn screening system manages the entire lab process,
including:
- receipt of blood spot cards from hospitals and midwives;
- registration of babies and tests, with full details of
collection;
- interface to laboratory analysis hardware and automatic
filing of results;
- provision of rules-based validation of results, based on
lab-specified criteria;
- automatic generation of letters to midwives/PCTs to
request any missing information (eg DoB, transfusion status) and for
repeat/follow-up blood spot collections based on first blood spot
quality and test results
- elimination of human error arising from manual keying and
re-keying of data;
- ad-hoc statistical reporting; and
- electronic interfaces to Child Health Authorities (CHAs) for
upload of babies’ demographics and download of test results.
BCH needed a laboratory computer system that could be tailored to its
requirements for newborn screening. Of particular importance was the
ability to develop the electronic links to the various child health
systems. These allow much of the process to be automated, which saves
time and avoids potential errors from unnecessary reading and retyping
of handwritten notes.
Paul Griffiths, Director of newborn Screening at BCH commented: “Even
though we had anticipated the changes being brought about by the
National Programme for IT and the individual choices being made by
primary care trusts in the region, we wanted a company on board that
would be able to work with us and be flexible enough to achieve our
goals. I’ve found ISS’s response to be very good. They’re always willing
to try things for us and were particularly helpful when we needed to
convert 25 years of historic data and bring it into a new national
system of coding for reporting results, a massive undertaking they
achieved for us with complete success.”
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