Overview
MDS Diagnostics is a healthcare provider whose 50 patient care centers feed lab specimens to its associated Burnaby Reference Laboratory (BRL), which performs more than 30,000 tests each day. With this kind of volume, the speed at which lab analyses can be turned around and delivered matters greatly from a business standpoint. But the problem for MDS was that an average of only 28 percent of each day’s total specimens were being delivered to BRL by 1:00 p.m., even though 61 percent of the specimens had already been collected from patients and were ready for pickup. After running a rapid-improvement event in just four days, the problem was solved, and turnaround time was decreased from 4.4 hours to 2.8 hours.