BD Customer Experience
With BD Customer Experience, we want to share the direct voices of our partners about what it means to face healthcare challenges every day, supported by BD solutions and personnel.
P.O. Di Venere – How Digitalization and Process Automation Can Support the Diagnostic Journey
1. Where We Are
The ASL of Bari consists of two hospital facilities located in the Metropolitan Area: the Di Venere Hospital and the San Paolo Hospital. These are supported by a network of districts managing territorial healthcare activities, ensuring extensive coverage and efficient service for the entire population. The Di Venere Hospital is a fundamental reference point for the entire Carbonara and Bari area. This facility has 30 operational units and services and is equipped with 61 specialist outpatient clinics offering consultations and treatments in various areas of medicine, along with 270 beds available for patient admissions. The Di Venere Emergency Department is an essential service for the community, with around 200 monthly visits. This frequency of visits highlights the importance of the hospital in managing healthcare emergencies. The Di Venere Hospital is classified as a first-level hospital, ensuring high standards of care and assistance.
2. Innovation and Optimization
As Dr. Adorisio (Director of the Department of Laboratory and Transfusion Medicine) describes, in the past, microbiology laboratories were numerous and scattered throughout the ASL territory, leading to fragmented resources and microbiological know-how. “Initially, microbiology was present in all the hospitals and laboratories within ASL Bari: this certainly resulted in a lack of real microbiological expertise,” continues Dr. Adorisio, “because microbiology specialists were not present in all the facilities.” Today, thanks to an important reorganization, all laboratories have been centralized in a single provincial facility at the Di Venere Hospital. This centralization, as described in the video by Dr. Adorisio, has allowed for the creation of a unified team of microbiology professionals, which has “increased our professional capabilities, allowed for economies of scale, and certainly benefited from the support of BD, which provided us with all the necessary technology to optimize these processes.” Currently, the Microbiology Laboratory has a team of 6 managers and 9 technicians and processes an average of 600 samples per day, coming from 36 sampling centers and 7 hospitals.
In addition to this reorganization, the Di Venere Hospital has embarked on an ambitious process of optimizing human and instrumental resources. As Dr. Lenoci (Medical Director, U.O.S.V.D.) describes, this process was made possible by extensive informatization and the implementation of an integrated microbiological island. The introduction of automation and digitalization in diagnostics has been a strong push toward the efficiency of operations, improving the quality of results and the laboratory itself. Inside the aquarium, the heart of the laboratory, “we now have a digital reading mode [for cultures] and are also fortunate to have a dashboard that allows us to perform the reading, reporting, evaluate identification, and possibly assign the antibiogram—all simultaneously: a huge advantage and a significant change compared to classic microbiology practices.”
3. The Microbiological Island
According to Dr. Francavilla (Laboratory Technician, U.O.S.V.D.), the implementation of the microbiological island has brought many benefits. With its introduction, the entire laboratory workflow is managed in an integrated manner, following the sample from reception to reporting. This means that each phase of the diagnostic process is closely linked and coordinated, supporting better process governance and handling more samples within the same working hours.
According to Dr. Lenoci, these innovations represent a major change in workflow compared to classical microbiology, where each phase was separate and took longer. According to her, these changes have revolutionized the work of hospital microbiologists, allowing for more efficient and accurate management of samples and final results: “Reporting times have been greatly reduced, so we can provide results much faster, with greater accuracy.”
And no less important, Dr. Lenoci continues, today the dialogue and approach with clinicians and departments has changed: “We can provide information that is more useful for patient management, especially in critical departments,” enabling the identification of the most appropriate therapy more quickly and providing better support for epidemiology.
Dr. Adorisio concludes by looking to the future, commenting that the microbiology department at Di Venere Hospital aims to “integrate microbiology with molecular biology technologies, and this will also allow us to support areas such as Sepsis and Rapid Sepsis Diagnostics, and also pay greater attention to antibiotic resistance, one of the biggest issues […] in microbiology.” In this, BD companies, which have shown themselves not to be just suppliers but true partners by the side of their clients, are of particular importance in realizing and achieving the future goals the facility is setting.
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Bibliography:
- Bari Da Opera Pia a ospedale, i cento anni del Di Venere: “Punto di riferimento per Bari e la Puglia” https://www.baritoday.it/attualita/ospedale-di-venere-cento-anni-storia.html
