Every vendor offered to change their software. One didn’t have to.
LifeServe was expanding, its quality team was spread across sites, and paper was sitting in offices and offsite storage. The difference that decided it was not a feature.
You cannot chase a record you do not know exists.
LifeServe’s footprint was growing, and its quality staff did not all sit in the same building — some in Sioux City, some in Des Moines, some on the road. They needed the same information in front of all of them regardless of where they were sitting. What they had instead was paper in several offices and more of it in offsite storage.
“We would have paper coming in and we didn’t necessarily even know what was coming and if we were missing something. If a team member was out and they were filling out a quality report because they had some kind of a deviation, we didn’t know to look for it.”
That is the failure mode paper hides best. A missing document announces itself only when somebody already knows to expect it — and in a distributed organisation, frequently nobody does. Waiting was the other cost: a record in another building meant asking someone to scan and send it, and receiving it days later, assuming it did not go astray on the way.
The answer that sounded different from all the others.
LifeServe was not shopping for a laboratory tool. The mandate, set by its CEO, was to move the whole organisation off paper — which meant the system had to serve departments well outside the lab. In vendor conversations, one answer kept recurring.
“As we were having conversations with different companies, it always became: we can adjust our software, make these changes to hopefully make this work for what your needs are. And that was the overarching theme that we kept running into. When we got into this software, it was much different — no, the software is set up so that we can make it what we need it to be.”
The distinction is not a marketing one. A vendor who adjusts their software on your behalf is a vendor you must queue behind every time your process changes. A platform configured by your own team is one that keeps matching your processes after go-live, when the changes are smaller, more frequent, and never important enough to justify a professional-services engagement.
An inspector stopped asking for the paper.
The clearest verdict came from outside the organisation. In a recent inspection, LifeServe was asked for records held in the system and records still held on paper.
“When they could see how easily it was for us to pull the records that were in the software, they were like: no, you don’t have to pull the records that were on paper. Which was a huge win for us.”
Beyond retrieval, the reporting changed what the quality team could see. Reports pull by department and by site; equipment can be listed per location; trend data shows where errors are actually happening — which, as Baedke puts it, they simply could not do before.
Two other changes are worth naming because they are structural rather than cosmetic. Deviation and quality-report data now flows to leadership dashboards as it is entered, rather than reaching them two months later when it is no longer actionable. And some second reviews have been eliminated outright — where a second pair of eyes existed only to catch transcription error, the system performs that check instead.
People like their paper. Show them the alternative anyway.
Pfeifer is candid that resistance was real, from department level through his own team: it is the difference between a physical book and an electronic one, and some teams love being able to cross things out by hand. His answer was not persuasion but demonstration.
“The first time you show them an automated report and they can read everything, and then you show them the manual one and they can’t read person X’s handwriting — nine times out of ten, they get it.”
Baedke’s version is shorter. Show them a search, a dashboard, a table with their data in it, and that will sell them on giving up the paper. Her advice to anyone weighing the move is four words: don’t be afraid to try it.
Interviewed at LifeServe Blood Center. The platform was PERFEQTA, the system Kintavo is built on and released under since 2016; the quality, deviation, equipment, and reporting workflows described here are the same ones Kintavo runs today. Quotations are from the recorded interview, lightly trimmed for length.