Labs measure things. A lot of things. From the levels of various cells, chemicals, proteins, and substances in the human body, through samples like blood or urine, and up to infectious diseases and more. But you already know that, because you’re running a clinical lab. However, even though you have a good laboratory information system (LIS), and even though you intend to be as efficient as possible…
There’s a good chance your lab isn’t measuring all the right things.
KPI stands for Key Performance Indicator. It is a quantifiable metric used to measure how effectively an organization, team, or individual is achieving key business objectives. Basically, KPIS are the vital signs organizations track to ensure they are on the right path. Even clinical labs.
Because a wall of charts nobody acts on is not a dashboard, but rather a very big wallpaper. To build a real lab KPI dashboard, one must begin with one hard question: which numbers actually change what the staff will do tomorrow? Now, the goal is not to track everything you can, but the handful of measures that reveal whether the lab is fast, accurate, and safe. And your LIS platform should provide that information – but it also should provide you with the means to translate that information into actionable items and measurements.
Let’s learn how to do that.
Which Laboratory KPIs Actually Matter
Decades of clinical lab work have established that quality indicators are a fundamental tool for quality and patient safety in laboratory medicine. Moreover, the data accumulated in the past few decades provides, without a shadow of a doubt, that most laboratory errors occur in the pre-analytical and post-analytical phases – and not inside the analyzer.
So, we shouldn’t bother pointing fingers at faulty hardware. Not only at it, anyway. It is now clear that most laboratory errors tend to come from the same place of origin – the human element. The errors and faults lie in the manner in which samples arrive and how results get out.
And if the errors live there, then the KPIs should live there as well. Now, it is indeed very tempting to over-measure the analytical phase. After all, the analytical phase is the easiest to quantify and also the most flattering, because modern analyzers are precise. That makes the numbers look great on a slide.
However, a dashboard that mostly reports on what’s not going to continuously fail is actually measuring data for comfort, instead of safety. What you really want to measure are the uncomfortable metrics, the ones tied to people and handoffs – because the way to achieve true efficiency (and better ROI, for example) lies there.
The Core Lab KPIs to Put on the Dashboard
The key to a useful clinical laboratory KPI dashboard is actually very short, and built on a few simple measures:
- Turnaround time, by test and priority
- Specimen rejection rate, so pre-analytical breakdowns are impossible to miss
- Mislabeling rates
- Critical value notification time – because a late critical result is a safety event
- Corrected report rate, which is a direct read on post-analytical accuracy
- Pending and overdue cases, so nothing ages out of sight
Additionally, there are two pillars to remember:
- Turnaround time should always remain at the top:
TTA is so central that it is referred to as “the benchmark clinicians use to judge laboratory performance”. - Resist the urge:
Once a proper KPI dashboard is implemented with a modern LIS platform, many lab stakeholders are tempted to add more measurements. Because why not, right? If you measure it, it will come! Well, the truth is that a dashboard with forty tiles will most likely get ignored. The reason is simple – nobody can tell which number needs attention. A short dashboard people actually read is much more efficient than a massive yet comprehensive dashboard that everyone simply scrolls past.
Turning Laboratory KPIs Into Action
Despite the promise of immediate efficiency in your lab, the reality is that a KPI dashboard only works if it drives a change. Otherwise, it’s just another nice-looking dashboard. Pretty colors, nice figures, but not actionable. No, for a truly motivating KPI dashboard, every metric needs a target, an owner, and a threshold that triggers a response.
And this is exactly where the LIS platform makes or breaks the effort. If the dashboard is a manual export that someone rebuilds on Excel (or even, god forbid, a free online tool from the early 2000s), it is stale before it is sent. And we’re not overselling the low effort, as many legacy LIS systems provide such dashboards.
What a modern clinical lab requires to produce modern results, only a cloud-native LIS can provide, as it calculates these laboratory KPIs live from the same data it uses to run cases. Only cloud-native and agile platforms can extract and produce numbers that reflect real-time results and data, instead of last week’s.
Your lab needs to measure the data that matters so your live dashboards stop being wallpaper and turn into a steering wheel that can help you produce results, and most importantly, growth.
➡️ BUILD IT NOW
