Ideagen Quality Management provides Nuffield Health with a central database for pathology compliance activities

Introduction

Nuffield Health identified a need for a central, electronic quality management system (QMS) to help them achieve and maintain their compliance responsibilities across their thirteen United Kingdom (UK) hub labs.

With multiple sites spread throughout the UK, Nuffield Health needed to centralise their pathology compliance activities in order to achieve and maintain compliance with industry standards and regulations such as ISO 15189, and MHRA.

The challenge

Tony Harvey, National Quality Manager at Nuffield Health, said: “We have undergone a significant transformation in how we deliver pathology to our hospitals over the past few years. With a network of 13 hub laboratories plus associated spoke sites, we needed to move from the original paper-based system we were working with to SharePoint. However, SharePoint could unfortunately only manage our documents, meaning we were unable to adequately manage our equipment, training and competency requirements, audit or corrective and preventive actions (CAPAs) using that system.”

The solution

Q-Pulse, the quality management solution developed by Ideagen, was chosen to help them effectively achieve a central database for pathology compliance, replacing their previous labour intensive and paper-based processes.

Tony Harvey, National Quality Manager at Nuffield Health, said: “We identified Q-Pulse as being the electronic quality management solution that would meet all of our quality requirements. Q-Pulse successfully managed the pains we were experiencing, and became the single integrated package we required that would form the basis of our QMS.

“Q-Pulse, in our view, is the leading software solution for managing Pathology quality systems to meet the requirements of ISO 15189 and MHRA. The ability to configure Q-Pulse to meet our needs and the fact that it had been implemented previously in several sites in the past gave us confidence that it would meet our needs in an enterprise network.

“Through Q-Pulse we can easily take care of document management, audit and audit associated corrective and preventive action, asset management, and we have just rolled out the training module which will be used for our 170+ staff across 25 sites. To date, we have over 1200 documents being managed in Q-Pulse, 900 assets being tracked, have the results of over 100 audits stored on the system, and are populating the training records of our staff in their multidisciplinary roles within Nuffield Health.”

Through their implementation of Q-Pulse, Nuffield Health has successfully centralised its pathology QMS procedures across the UK and now work with one central database and server solution. As a result, they have simplified the management of their compliance requirements.

Tony said: “We have already noticed better visibility of our document libraries and local quality managers now have electronic document acknowledgement which is much easier to manage compared to the previous system we used before. In my role as National Quality Manager I can now oversee our audit program for all of our sites with a few clicks. This enables me to identify sites that need assistance to complete audit or close outstanding noncompliances, thus ensuring good compliance to our audit program.”

Tony added: “The full package from Ideagen has been excellent. The system is fully configurable to meet our needs and particular situations, the training/ configuration sessions were helpful and professionally delivered, giving us the vision on how to best configure Q-Pulse for Nuffield Health. On the rare occasion where we may have a technical or system issue within Q-Pulse, Ideagen’s help desk have also been extremely supportive.”