The Armed Forces Institute of Pathology's Department of Scientific Labs has seven sections. These sections are: Microtomy; Routine/STAT Immunohistochemistry; Research and Development Immunohistochemistry; Hematology Immunohistochemistry; Special Stains; Neuromuscular; and GU Lab. They also have a central administrative office or receiving department called acquisitions. For the past year, everyone in the department of Sci Labs has worked with a computer based order entry. .
Acquisitions would receive specimen with their request from within the institute, or from any hospital in the U.S. Or the world. Acquisitions screens these cases and will log cases into our computer based order entry system then forward the specimen with requested test to the appropriate section. Each of these sections received and tracked these cases differently. There was no effort made by the made by the department's chairman nor the chief to mandate a uniform way to streamline the work-flow.
The chairman, who is an Army officer, decided autocractically to change our computer based order entry system to intranet based. Why did he do this? Was it to streamline the work-flow or to be done as another pet project of his own?.
Logically, if he was trying to streamline the work-flow, this would be great for tracking work-flow and where the specimen were at and how complete the cases were, but if he was just trying to persuade us to use this new way to do order entry just as another pet project of his own to justify another bullet on his evaluation we would surely cause problems for everyone.
The logical approach would work well because there was a real need to streamline tracking where specimen were and what was happening to that specimen. Everyone would be working on the same system so that each section was receiving and tracking the specimen in a uniform manor. Unfortunetly, it was more of a pet project.