Meridian Labs

Meridian's three collection centres each kept their own records, and the central lab kept a third set. A patient who gave a sample at one centre and rang another about it was, as far as the software was concerned, two different people.

Results moved between sites by courier twice a day, and urgently by photographing a printed report and sending it on WhatsApp. That worked, in that clinicians got their results, but it meant the authoritative copy of a report was sometimes a photograph on somebody's phone.

Derived values were calculated by hand. Dr. Qureshi had introduced a double-check procedure at verification precisely because index errors were being caught regularly — which solved the accuracy problem by spending senior time on arithmetic.

All three centres and the central lab moved onto one patient record, so a sample given anywhere is visible everywhere. Branch-level permissions mean each centre sees its own collections and billing, while the central lab and management see everything.

Automatic calculation removed hand-worked indices entirely. The double-check procedure at verification was retained but changed in character: pathologists now check clinical plausibility rather than re-doing arithmetic.

Digital delivery replaced the courier and the photographs. Reports go to patients and referring clinicians on verification, and the QR code gives any recipient a way to confirm they are looking at the authoritative version.

Average turnaround fell by about nine hours, most of it recovered from waiting for a courier run.

Index calculation errors stopped appearing at verification, which Dr. Qureshi describes as the single biggest quality improvement of the year.

Having all three centres on one record also surfaced something unexpected: a meaningful number of patients were using more than one centre, and had been generating duplicate records and repeat baseline tests for years.