Microbiology Resulting

When the microbiologist INCOMPLETES the first isolate, the results are immediately visible to healthcare providers in CPSI. The main issue we have is that when we incomplete the second isolate, the first isolate is now REPLACED with the second isolate and the health care providers now only see the second isolate until the microbiologist is able to go back into the analyzer to manually resubmit both cultures at the same time.

Due to only having one microbiologist on staff, the microbiologist is unable to continuously review isolates to catch these inconsistencies. As a result, the inaccurate results provided to the healthcare providers have cause confusion and can negatively affect antibiotic treatment choices.

The addition of an ADD function to the microbiology list of functions would allow for multiple cultures to be reported at the same time without requiring going into the analyzer to resubmit all resulted cultures simultaneously.

1. Microbiologist must select one of these functions to proceed. REPLACE function is selected. If there was an ADD function, the first culture results wont be replaced with the second culture results is available.

2. After selecting REPLACE, microbiologist can now review and select INCOMPLETE while awaiting the second culture results and repeats the same steps again.

I hope this explains the situation. The reporting of incomplete microbiology results to the healthcare providers has been problematic for us and the addition of the ADD function would truly help alleviate this issue that has been ongoing at our facility.

Bernie A Sauer

Director of Information Technology