English 
Italian Information Technology in Medicina di Laboratorio: sviluppo di un’applicazione indipendente per la gestione della tracciabilità e degli esiti dei tamponi per SARS-CoV-2 inviati a strutture esterne
Information Technology in Laboratory Medicine: development of a stand-alone application for the management of the traceability and outcomes of SARS-CoV-2 swabs
AUTORI
Laboratorio Centrale ASST Spedali Civili, Brescia
Questo lavoro è stato in parte presentato al 52° Congresso Nazionale SIBioC, 6-8 Ottobre 2020, Virtual Edition, sotto forma di Poster, ricevendo il premio SIBioC destinato ai 4 migliori poster presentati
ABSTRACT
Information Technology in Laboratory Medicine: development of a stand-alone application for the management of the traceability and outcomes of SARS-CoV-2 swabs
Introduction: during the health emergency for SARS-CoV-2 pandemic, the high number of diagnostic swabs from different health care facilities overcome quickly the hospital clinical laboratory capacity of analysis, that was dedicated to in-patients, and first aid department. The processing of this large number of swabs had to be entrusted thus to an external laboratory. As a consequence, the hospital clinical laboratory, under the pressure of an exponentially growing number of samples, allocated internal resources to develop the software described in the paper, for an efficient management of these samples.
Methods: an in-house Microsoft Windows Application (Microsoft®) has been written using Visual Basic .NET (Microsoft®) with the support of a relational database provided by Oracle (Oracle®), already deployed in the Hospital Information System. The name of the application is TraceCOVID.
Results: the application has an integration with different data entry application and LIS (Laboratory Information System) to receive the information related to the sample. TraceCOVID manages samples’ check-in and automatically sends and receives data to/from the external laboratory server, associates the report to the specific patient and sends an email message containing the results of the molecular test to each patient. The application offers the possibility to print the report if necessary. There is also a statistics section that monitors the number of samples and the outcomes, generating different types of outputs.
Discussion: the health crisis due to COVID19, has highlighted how the presence of informatic skills in the clinical laboratories has made it possible to cope with a critical aspect related to the swabs’ management, allowing an efficient information flows to the patient and to the health authorities.