How Moving to the Cloud Increased Efficiency for Dr Lal PathLabs

Enterprises in the healthcare sector are going all out to ensure customer satisfaction by automating certain crucial business processes. And Dr. Lal PathLabs (LPL), is one of them.

Dr Lal PathLabs is a 65-year-old healthcare company with a rich experience in pathology testing. With over 150 Labs and over 2,000 centers across the country, it offers the largest test menu and caters to over 12 million customers every year.

Despite its envious presence, process automation existed only at lab locations and was captured in the ERP directly and moved to LIMS for analytical processing. Patient information was being captured manually at collection centers, which form a major share of LPL’s total business. Collection center executives used to fill the Test Requisition Form (TRF) manually at their location and send it along with the sample.          

This arrangement created a number of challenges like pre-analytical errors, revenue leakage, and inefficiency, which in turn, increased turnaround time.

“We are growing at a rate of 30 percent a year and our sample load is increasing day-by-day. It becomes difficult to manage business critical processes. Manual processes need a lot of manpower and attention in the business value chain,” says Munender Soperna, CIO, Dr. Lal PathLabs.

So, in November 2013, the company decided to invest in an e-registration module, a standalone application hosted on the cloud. Now it hardly takes 40 seconds to register a patient and provide him with a cash receipt.

“Unlike earlier, when the manually-captured TRFs were registered in the system at lab locations, now our executives register patients at their respective locations, and the data transfers automatically to my ERP location. When the sample reaches our lab, we can directly send the sample to the required department for processing. This has reduced the duplicacy of patient data entry and turnaround time drastically. As mentioned earlier the sample does not wait for the data entry process which sometimes could take 30 to 35 minutes. This has increased our efficiency by 15-20 percent,” says Soperna.

Today, the application has been rolled out in about 900 locations, and is leaving a lasting impression on customers and the company’s business.

We ensured improved efficiency by moving to the cloud.