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Remembering COVID: Say Goodbye to Your Direct-to-Consumer Lab Testing Bottlenecks With TestDirectly
January 28, 2025
The COVID-19 pandemic provided critical lessons about resilience, innovation, and preparedness for the laboratory industry, and we all must take it upon ourselves to focus on adaptability, technology, collaboration, and workforce well-being to collectively build on the lessons learned and work toward a stronger future.
By embracing these lessons, the medical lab industry can enhance its capacity to address future public health challenges while maintaining excellence in patient care.
With that in mind, let’s take a step back and remember what life was like for a lab professional during the pandemic. As we look back on COVID-19 and its widespread impact, we should also focus on the positive stories that resulted from this infectious disease.
Here’s one of those positive stories, first published on September 9, 2020.
How Lab Bottlenecks are No Match for TestDirectly
How can my molecular LIS lab simplify workflows and accelerate COVID-19 test results to meet the growing national demand for more access to testing and faster results?
What can be done to boost capacity, remove testing backlogs, eliminate paper requisitions, improve turnaround times, and better manage patient follow-up?
These are the questions that lab directors and managers across the country continue to ask themselves as they search for ways to effectively address a highly infectious disease and its negative impact on society.
Fortunately, there is a new innovative direct-to-consumer lab testing tool on the market that not only removes the barriers and the friction that cause testing and reporting delays, but also directly links laboratories and collection facilities with patients, physicians, businesses, and government agencies, making them direct-to-consumer labs that can offer fast, safe, and easy testing.
TestDirectly is a dynamic, direct-to-consumer lab testing portal designed to help laboratories increase their ability to handle more COVID-19 testing while improving the turnaround time for patients to get their consumer lab reports with test results. The portal makes this possible by replacing paper requisitions with an electronic workflow that eliminates the paperwork and manual processes that lead to order entry bottlenecks, data entry errors, and delayed results delivery.
Interested and want to learn more?
We can help.
The TestDirectly portal was recently featured at this year’s virtual Executive War College hosted by Robert Michel (Publisher and Editor-in-Chief of The Dark Report). He led a discussion that included LigoLab CEO Suren Avunjian and Northwest Laboratory COO Jennifer Bull.
What follows are excerpts from that highly informative roundtable forum.
Executive War College Program Highlights:
During their Executive War College appearance, Avunjian and Bull discussed how:
- The idea for a direct-to-consumer lab testing portal was born pre-pandemic, and how the direct-to-consumer market continues to grow with more people taking control of their health and becoming educated about their treatment options.
- In February 2020 the LigoLab Development team pivoted and began designing TestDirectly as a platform for COVID-19 drive-through testing.
- Northwest Laboratory, a LigoLab partner lab since 2015, became the first laboratory to implement the TestDirectly diagnostic lab software solution into its workflow and how the portal - along with the flexible and comprehensive nature of LigoLab’s all-in-one laboratory information and lab billing platform - helped position Northwest Laboratory to accept a state contract from the Florida Department of Health.
- The contract called for baseline testing of asymptomatic patients in the state’s 4,000 long-term care facilities in 67 counties.
- From TestDirectly implementation to go-live, the Northwest Laboratory partnership with Florida produced 190,000 test results in just four weeks.
- The TestDirectly workflow supported an AI-powered data extraction tool and crowdsourcing to turn handwritten orders into digital data fields, and how this outside-of-the-box thinking was needed because COVID-19 collection and testing began before TestDirectly was fully operational.
- TestDirectly, its parent company LigoLab, and Northwest Laboratory teamed to help Florida achieve its goal despite encountering a few roadblocks along the way, and what lessons were learned.
- LigoLab and Northwest Laboratory continue to identify parts of the collection, testing, and reporting processes that can become more efficient and quality-driven.
- Northwest Laboratory is now set up to handle the direct-to-consumer lab testing needs of large organizations, universities, and other large institutions, and how it’s now handling its drive-through implementations internally, supported by LigoLab’s development team.
- TestDirectly plans to add at-home testing and new functionality to the workflow that will lead to even more efficiency in the lab and at the collection facility.
Key Quotes From the Participants:
“Our TestDirectly platform targets and eliminates the barriers that can cause reporting delays and frees laboratories from committing large amounts of time on manual order entry and resources for case follow-up.”
- Suren Avunjian, CEO, LigoLab
“At Northwest Laboratory, we’re now also set up to handle the testing needs of large organizations, universities, and other large institutions. LigoLab’s support, an out-of-the-box solution, and a strong IT department have made this possible, enabling us to quickly go live with new drive-through locations and get testing up and running in 48-to-72 hours.”
- Jennifer Bull, COO, Northwest Laboratory
“One of the real themes that came out of this session was the importance of being a master of informatics and being able to digitize and move data to where it needs to be in a timely fashion. Because of the automation of testing, once it gets to the bench, everything goes pretty smoothly. So it’s everything that happens to get it to the bench and then to get the results back to all the different players that are so important. It’s improving your ability to be nimble in the digital age as a laboratory.”
- Robert Michel, Publisher, Editor-in-Chief, The Dark Report
To learn more about what was discussed at EWC 2020 and how the fully customizable pathology software that powers both LigoLab and TestDirectly has helped Northwest Laboratory process over 500,000 COVID-19 tests in four months, contact a LigoLab product specialist today.
Find Out More About TestDirectly By Visiting These Links:
TestDirectly Simplifies Workflows and Improves Turnaround Times
Introducing TestDirectly, One of LigoLab’s Powerful Supporting Modules
Florida Turns to TestDirectly and Northwest Laboratory to Protect its Seniors from COVID-19
TestDirectly: A Better Way to Collect, Process, and Report COVID-19 Tests
The TestDirectly direct-to-consumer lab testing portal is available anywhere, anytime, and supports any LIS medical and lab RCM solution. It helps laboratories quickly move to an electronic workflow that addresses the order entry bottleneck and reduces data entry errors.
TestDirectly supports drive-through and on-site collections with a workflow that expedites patient data collection, laboratory billing operations, report delivery, and follow-up. It enables laboratories to boost capacity and improve turnaround times.
Learn More: Introducing a New Revenue Source for Labs
