DCL Pathology

Bryan Szpunar is the operations manager for DCL Pathology, an independent lab specializing in anatomic and clinical pathology, as well as other specialty areas including cytopathology. The organization currently has 26 Qualtrax users.

The lab uses the Qualtrax system to manage documents and track the testing and training of its employees, among other tasks. Having a centralized data repository has provided significant time and cost savings for the team, which faces a CAP audit every two years, a New York state audit every two years, and frequent client audits, which can range from five or six in a “slow” year to 10 or 12. Things can get a little hectic!

“In our previous process, we’d print our checklists and standards out, then sit down and go through them one by one,” Bryan says. “Qualtrax allows us to say, ‘we’re covered on 70 percent of this because we’ve already done all that prep work on the front side, so let’s just worry about the other 20 percent.”

With the potential for a client audit to hit at any time, the Qualtrax system has allowed DCL Pathology to maintain a constant state of audit readiness.

“I think one of the greatest benefits we’ve had is just being compliance ready and audit ready on a moment’s notice,” Bryan says. “I had a request a few weeks ago for training records for a particular document that related to a study we were working on and I produced it and sent it to the client in about five minutes.”

The robust nature of the Qualtrax system, including document management, testing and training and workflow functions, is so powerful that it has completely eliminated the need for DCL Pathology to hire a full-time quality manager.

“It was really, do something different in terms of document management, or have a dedicated QA person, which we don’t have – and that’s not a low-level FTE either, it’s much more of a leadership level – so really when you look at the trade-off of, do you use Qualtrax and gain a bunch of efficiency, or do you hire an entirely new person to manage this growing need, it’s a pretty easy decision.”

Categories: Audits, ROI