Pinellas County Forensic Laboratory

Pinellas County Forensic Laboratory is an ASCLD/LAB accredited forensic laboratory that serves over a million people in Pinellas County, Florida.

As the Quality Manager at Pinellas County, Jason Hodges manages compliance and audit preparation for a full ASCLD/LAB audit every 4 years, annual ASCLD/LAB surveillance visits, DNA external audits every 2 years, and nearly a dozen internal audits per year. They needed a solution to improve their document control system, which largely required physical sign-offs on document revisions and training.

“We chose Qualtrax because it looked much simpler than the document control system that we currently had in place. […] The options for document control and the simplicity with which you can change from version to version without doing all that stuff on paper was very attractive to us.”

In addition to reducing the amount of manual work required for document revisions, switching to Qualtrax also made a large impact on the audit experience. Rather than presenting an auditor with a number of large binders to flip through, they now use the Qualtrax system for audits, which allows the auditor to perform searches and locate relevant documents more easily.

“With Qualtrax, we have an easier way to show auditors where our documents are.”

Another area where Pinellas County has seen large improvements is with tracking employee training. Because of the accreditation requirements they’re under, they must be able to demonstrate that employees have been trained on every revision to every document. Prior to implementing Qualtrax, this took place in meetings where those attending would sign off that they understood the changes. With Qualtrax, they’re able to send out tests with each revision of a document, which saves them time that would be spent in meetings. And Jason has found that by creating test questions with each revision, he can encourage people to more closely read and understand the changes in documents.

“The number one way Qualtrax has simplified our organization is the document control process. It used to be a manual process with a lot of paper, a lot of chasing people around to have them sign things, and now with the Qualtrax software, it’s just a lot simpler to track the document changes and track that all the documents are going where they’re supposed to be and everybody is trained on them.”

Category: Forensic Labs