Point-of-care data delivery

Spectrum Laboratory Network is deploying a new solution to provide mobile access to patient and laboratory information so physicians can find the data quickly and make better informed decisions at the point of care.

The regional clinical laboratory, with an affiliated network of hospitals in North Carolina and Tennessee, chose the MercuryMD offering from Thomson Healthcare, part of Thomson Corp. The solution is expected to provide 20,000 doctors in the network with immediate, anywhere access to test results and laboratory information via smart phones or PDAs. Spectrum processes about 11,000 laboratory orders each day.

"Aggressive use of information technology is a fundamental strategy that lets us continually add to the value that our network delivers to patients and physicians--improving the quality of patient care, decreasing response times to lab results, and reducing costs and medical errors," says Nate Headley, president and CEO of Spectrum Laboratory Network. "Seventy percent of decisions that physicians make are based on lab results. With MercuryMD, those results are delivered to doctors quickly, wherever those doctors happen to be when the results are available. By untethering the doctor from the computer terminal we are delivering our lab results to clinicians at the point of care--resulting in better, timelier and more cost-effective clinical decisions."

Doctors can access the service by having it installed on their smart phones or PDAs for continuity of patient care. All data is encrypted and password protected for privacy, Thomson reported in a recent news release.