Pathological Diagnosis Portal

The pathology requisition service is a centralized service for clinicians in BC. Clinicians can electronically submit pertinent medical and biospecimen information for pathological review.

The Problem

Clinicians were creating new entries instead of editing existing ones. This caused issues when the pathologists needed to link the physical biopsy to the digital entry.

There had to be a way to remove the duplicates without losing data and prevent clinicians from creating redundant entries.

The Process

We worked with our client to determine the workflow of the clinicians and gave us scenarios where duplicates occurred so that we can put ourselves in the clinicians' shoes.

Next, we worked on how to combine and delete duplicate entries in a way that is intuitive and functional.

The Solution

After a few meetings and different designs, we solved two problems:

1. As clinicians preferred to create a new entry instead of editing an existing one, we added a check to see if an entry has been created recently, and if so prompt them to view and edit the existing one instead.

2. To fix the duplicates, we designed an algorithm which goes through all existing entries prompt the user to check which ones can be merged together.

The Outcome

After the update was deployed, the number of duplicated entries dropped significantly. The automated tool also offered monitoring duplicates that can be merged or deleted.

The algorithm helps users to accurately track the biopsy records of their patients and ensures the accuracy of the information provided to the pathologists.