How to remove human decisions with little added value: an interview with Cécile Fargeat, Medical Biologist at Cerballiance

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Kardinal supports Cerballiance in the digitalization and optimization of its activity. The network of medical labs optimizes the planning of its home blood tests thanks to Kardinal’s software solution.

Cécile Fargeat, Medical Biologist at Cerballiance, answered our questions about the implementation of this project.

Kardinal: Hi Cécile, can you tell us a little more about Cerballiance and your role in the company?

Cécile Fargeat: My name is Cécile Fargeat, I am a medical biologist at Cerballiance. The Cerballiance network is a French network of city labs but also of labs located in clinics or private hospitals. It currently represents almost 500 labs across France.

K: What problems led to the implementation of the project with Kardinal?

CF: When we started working on the digitalization of the organization of home blood sampling, I was in charge of a lab where 3 samplers were on duty every day. On a daily basis, I was facing many organizational difficulties to manage patients and samplers. The project was born out of this problem and the need to automate this management.
For my area (Paris city and the eastern suburbs), this represented several dozen samplers (and therefore several dozen employees to manage) and several hundred patients for whom it was necessary to schedule appointments, create routes, take into account the constraints in terms of visiting hours as well as the little things you need to know in order to take care of them properly, to be able to tell them the estimated time of the sampler’s visit, and then to fulfill this commitment.
We realized that doing this by hand was almost impossible and we couldn’t really do it. It was so time consuming and complicated to organize that the way we did it was usually unsatisfactory.

K: What benefits does the tool implemented with Kardinal provide you in your daily work?

CF: Our patients were often unhappy with us, which made this activity stressful. The aim of this tool is to remove some human decisions and interventions that are, in the end, stressful for our teams and do not provide much value added in terms of organizational quality.
The objective is to simplify the work of our teams but also to fulfill the commitments we make to our patients. For example, we have rather elderly patients, especially diabetics, who cannot fast until noon. Therefore, we make a commitment to visit them before a certain time to take their blood sample as quickly as possible, but it is not unusual for the sampler to be unable to meet this commitment.
The tool set up with Kardinal will help us, and is already helping us today, to meet our commitments but also to avoid unnecessary trips, especially to a patient who has finally eaten because we arrived too late. This is a benefit for our patients because we stick to what we told them and we can work in good conditions.

K: What did you think of the implementation of the project with Kardinal?

CF: We’ve been working with Kardinal’s teams for a long time. I found it very enriching to work with people from a totally different industry and to have to explain our business to them, and they to translate their expertise in terms we could understand.
I really appreciated the flexibility of Kardinal’s teams in making sure we all understood each other properly. They were always available, especially at the beginning of the full-scale tests when the teams needed immediate support. Without this availability, we would not have been able to move forward as we did today.
We have established a real partnership with Kardinal’s teams: we are moving forward hand in hand and this is really valuable and essential.