Inspiration
The current standard for Quality Control (QC) in the laboratory was created 40 years ago by a guy named Westgard. Think about that… 40 years ago was the year Apple Computer was founded and most popular TV show was Happy Days. We’re now in the age of Watson and streaming media, but the laboratory is still using the same basic principles and systems. To be fair, they did move from graphing paper to Microsoft Excel, but let’s be realistic, that’s not innovation. Being experts in laboratory medicine, and coding geeks as a side gig, we decided to improve the tedious quality control process the best way we know how… in PHP and a slick UX.
What it does
4DQC is a quality control software package aimed at improving laboratory medicine efficiencies and lowering costs. It's an online software suite for reference/clinical laboratories which saves time on manual (QC) processes and gives laboratory personnel and physician’s insight into the overall health of their laboratory operations leading to better business decisions in regards to quality. Preliminary findings at our Beta-Partner lab support a 90+% reduction in labor costs associated with repetitive manual QC processes. 4DQC is also able to decrease routine, scheduled maintenance intervals with data driven, condition based maintenance operations. We're able to identify upcoming failure points in our instruments and conduct proactive maintenance to almost eliminate unscheduled downtime. We also provide integrated troubleshooting steps customized based on the workflow issues. This allows the laboratory staff to quickly focus on quality issues and get instant feedback on next steps to resolve. Today this process typically includes using supporting paperwork or documents to memorize or review and compare against QC output data. 4DQC eliminates the need for additional systems or documents to complete their workflow and troubleshoot QC.
How we built it
4DQC is built with PHP
Challenges we ran into
Instrument vendors in the laboratory setting typically do not standardize their outputs. We plan to overcome this limitation by creating a service to transform additional instrument vendor outputs into the needed 4DQC consumable format.
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