Timeliness and best demonstrated practices.

Significant changes have occurred in many hospital-based laboratories over the past few years. The demands from the medical staff to deliver the highest quality test results in the shortest possible time coupled with the mandates from hospital administration to become cost efficient have given laboratory managers many challenging opportunities. Information management is a basic component of the process required to meet the timeliness goal. Best demonstrated practices for the various sections within our laboratory resulted when combining five components of daily management. These are instrument automation, using a laboratory information system to auto-merge and auto-release tests, consolidating workstations, redistributing work among the technical and nontechnical personnel, and implementing key indicators to follow improvement.