Five minutes, down to fifteen seconds.
MD Anderson's blood bank donor services team ran quality control across two systems — a blood bank information system for what it could hold, and paper for everything else. Then an inspector asked for a record.
Two systems, and neither one held everything.
MD Anderson's blood bank donor services team recorded quality control two ways. MAK, its blood bank information system, covered part of the work. Everything MAK could not hold — and there was a great deal of it — went onto paper forms.
The consequence was not that quality work was done badly. It was that the volume of handwriting made keeping up structurally impossible, and things fell through the gap between the two systems.
“Before PERFEQTA, we used two different ways to register the QC. One was MAK and a lot of paper, a lot of forms, a lot of writing … we missed schedules, we missed QC, because it’s almost impossible to catch up with writing forms and to the QCs.”
The validation exercise surfaced the rest of it. Bringing the processes into one system meant reconciling what was supposed to exist against what actually did — and, in her words, “we found out a lot of stuff was missing before.”
One place to enter it, one place to find it.
The team consolidated QC entry, equipment checks, and maintenance scheduling into a single system, with the schedule driving the work rather than a person remembering it. Data entry got faster; so did the part nobody plans for, which is retrieval.
Keneson describes the day-to-day change as consistency first and speed second: consistent QC data entry and review, maintenance and QC kept on schedule, and records that can be filtered and searched instead of walked to. Training took, in her assessment, very little time.
The number that matters is the one an inspector creates.
Asked to quantify the difference, Keneson picked the moment quality systems are actually tested — an inspector asking for a specific record, in the room, waiting.
“The inspector asked, give me a monthly, the biannual. It takes us now probably 15 seconds. Before, we had to go to the folder — probably around 5 minutes.”
Before, a person walked to a shelf and worked through folders while the inspector worked through papers. Now the request is a query. The same records that took five minutes to locate can also be filtered, trended, and printed on the spot.
Her summary of the platform is plainer than anything we would write for it: easier to complete, automatic, quick, and easy to learn. She has since run demonstrations of it for other laboratories herself.
Interviewed at The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center, where Nidia Keneson is Blood Bank Donor Services Manager. The platform was PERFEQTA, the system Kintavo is built on and released under since 2016; the QC, equipment, and document workflows described here are the same ones Kintavo runs today. Quotations are from the recorded interview, lightly trimmed for length.