OZ Systems, Arlington, Texas, has launched the first-ever newborn screening suite designed specifically for hospitals, aiming to improve newborn patient safety and standard of care while facilitating timely and accurate newborn blood spot screening.
Terese Finitzo, PhD, OZ Systems.
Every year, more than 12,000 infants in the United States are affected by disorders commonly screened in the newborn period. Timely screening and accurate information are the keys to identifying these disorders, mitigating risk, and averting disaster.
“With all newborn screening, there is a window of opportunity to change a baby’s future and prevent life-lasting disability or death,” explains Terese Finitzo, PhD, CEO of OZ Systems. “We are assisting hospitals in meeting quality goals, essentially by automating timeliness. This is the first-ever end-to-end screening solution with real-time birth information for improved accuracy, electronic lab ordering to eliminate duplicate and error-prone data entry, smart specimen tracking with fast alerts, and timely automated results communication back to hospitals.”
Maria Cantu, OZ Systems.
“It is our goal to leverage modern technology so that all babies have the opportunity to reach their full potential,” adds Maria Cantu, vice president of operations at OZ Systems. “We are committed to making a difference in newborn healthcare. Our integrated newborn specimen collection-to-reporting solution simplifies workflows in the hospital, eliminates handoffs to deliver timely results so hospitals’ newborn screening programs are more cost-effective, and reduces human error.”
Workflow of the OZ Newborn Screening Suite for end-to-end management of newborn blood spot screening (click to enlarge).
The OZ Newborn Screening Suite combines OZ NaniI, OZ Telepathy NBS, OZ Connect, and the Track-Kit by STACS DNA. Taken together, the suite offers a wide range of capabilities:
- Alerts the hospital when a specimen is delayed or missing.
- Captures the submitted information and stores it for future audits.
- Captures multiple specimens for an individual patient.
- Displays age in hours in order to collect specimens at appropriate times.
- Improves identification by scanning the specimen ID barcode.
- Packages specimen cards efficiently by generating the shipping manifest and label.
- Provides delivery notification to hospitals to meet CAP/CLIA regulations.
- Provides worklists of babies needing screening and the status for each specimen collected.
- Reduces handwritten and error- prone information on the baby’s specimen card through electronic capture from the hospital’s electronic health record (EHR).
- Submits an electronic lab order so the state lab is aware that a specimen is being sent.
- Tracks both specimens and packages during the shipping process.; you know the status of every specimen
- Transmits electronic lab results from the lab back to the OZ eSP database, an integrated child health record, and to the hospital EHR.
- Uses more than 2 patient identifiers for each baby’s specimens, in accord with patient safety goals of the Joint Commission.
“Bundling OZ products provides greater workflow efficiency, improvement in patient safety, and risk reduction,” concludes Finitzo.
For more information, visit OZ Systems.
