Optimizing at-home blood test planning for Cerballiance labs
The Cerballiance network of medical biology laboratories optimizes the planning of its at-home blood tests thanks to the Kardinal solution. Find out how Cerballiance digitized the management of its at-home blood tests and for what benefits for its teams.
If you prefer to read the Cerballiance case study summary in pdf, it is here 
About Cerballiance
The Cerballiance network represents more than 500 medical biology laboratories which are present throughout France, in metropolitan France and in Réunion. The Cerballiance network is part of the Cerba Healthcare group, which is also present in other countries: Luxembourg, Belgium, Italy and also in some African countries.
In France, the Cerballiance network has over 4,800 employees and takes care of more than 70,000 patients per day in its labs, at-home or in healthcare centers.
Pre-project overview
Manual planning by each lab
At the time, when we started working on the subject of digitizing the organization of home blood tests, I was in charge of a laboratory where every day there were 3 nurses going out. Every day, I had a lot of organizational problems, the management of the patients, the management of the nurses. The project was born from this idea that this management had to be automated.
Before the project, the appointments for at-home blood tests were recorded by the clerks the day before, and then the samplers manually divided the appointments into different rounds for the next day. This planning took about 1 hour per lab and required a recheck the next morning before leaving the lab to ensure that all patient constraints were met.
This planning was carried out on a lab-by-lab basis, without any possibility of pooling appointments between labs.
A complex planning due to strict constraints
At-home blood test planning required Cerballiance labs to take into account industry-specific constraints, e.g:
- managing sample returns to the lab: it is important to comply with the pre-analytical requirements of the collected biological samples. For example, a blood sample must be brought back to the lab within 3 hours after its collection to be centrifuged,
- sample collector/collection: the compatibility of the sample collectors and technical procedure must be considered when planning (for example, not all sample collectors can place a catheter),
- the time slots for the sampler to come and go: the fact that some patients have caretakers at home determines the time slots for the samplers to visit.
There are many constraints of this kind that must be taken into account when optimizing the rounds, which makes it very difficult to plan them manually.
Make an appointment, create the round, take into account the obligations in terms of hours of passage, the little things to know to take care of them correctly, be able to tell them at what time approximatively we would be able to come and then keep this commitment. Doing all this by hand, it appeared that it was almost impossible.
The solution
Since using the Kardinal solution, secretaries or nurses make appointments on the web interface. Then, the site manager indicates the working hours of each nurse. Then the algorithm starts automatically and the next morning, the nurse just has to take her phone and go!
The software created by Kardinal is a business solution dedicated to scheduling appointments by taking into account specific business constraints of at-home blood sampling operations:
- Management of lab returns
- Pooling inter-lab samples
- Automatic and optimized emergency dispatch
- The transportation method used (on foot, public transport, by car)
- Resource prioritization system (with possible backup)
- Considering the sampler's departure address
- Considering the collector's skills (e.g., catheter placement)
- Considering the samples' life span
- Possibility to set the sampling time
- Possibility to set the maximum distance covered by each sampler
Advantages
At the lab
It took over an hour to dispatch our 30-40 patients per day. With Kardinal, we save at least 1 hour of time, so the person who planned the round for more than an hour can do other things in the lab.
Time savings on planning
Improved productivity
Easier emergency management (automatic dispatch)
Increased overview of the current rounds
Compliance with preanalytical sampling requirements
Improved communication by centralizing information
Before Kardinal, there had to be perfect communication between everyone but that wasn't always the case. Knowing the requirements of each patient, their time constraints, the presence of a home help or other: Kardinal made it easier to manage these time constraints.
For nurses
Less stress on meeting constraints
Less time wasted during the execution of the round
Fewer miles traveled
The Kardinal solution allows us to limit the distance traveled by each nurse: previously, nurses tried to optimize rounds without calculating the number of kilometers traveled. Now we can enter data into the system so that they do not travel more than 5 kilometers each morning.
For patients
Beyond the optimization and the improvements of the rounds, what we really appreciate is that we can estimate at what time we visit each patient. When a patient calls us because he is worried that the nurse has not yet come by, we will be able to tell him: "you are next" or "we will arrive within 1 hour or 1 and a half hours", something that patients really appreciate.
