Good morning Mr GASCOIN, thank you for welcoming us and giveing your testimony. It is so important for us to give voice to our customers. The 1st interview with Laure ANNETTE at the Institut Curie in Paris about FINA & CRYSTAL solutions registered many readers!
Yes, I read the interview and I realised that our experience was very similar, from the issues that led us to automate the archiving of blocks and then slides, to the implementation and use of the Fina and Crystal systems. We are part of the IUCT Oncopole, which was born from the of the Claudius Regaud Institute with teams from the CHU Rangueil and CHU Purpan, its missions being care research and teaching in oncology.
Our laboratory has a staff of about 100 people including 30 pathologists and 65 technicians. Our activity is organised around 9 sectors: routine activity IHC, FISH, molecular biology, histoenzymology, immunofluorescence, fetopathology, proteomics and electron microscopy. We have 3 antennas 1 for the Oncopole, 1 for the Purpan site and 1 for the Rangueuil site.
We process about 230,000 blocks and 450,000 slides per year.
Many people, whether they work for the clinical activity or on the research side, are involved with the blocks and slides in pathology. If we lose a block or a slide, this can very quickly cause us to lose time, not to mention the risk of losing material. Indeed, given our activity, it is very difficult for us to find a block or a slide once it is lost.
Before the installation of the Fina and Crystal systems, the blocks were often misplaced and the procedure in place to trace people who took a block or blade was not always followed. On the other hand, the time spent on archiving slides & blocks in numerical order was very time-consuming. The person in charge of laboratory logistics spent a large part of his time and the macroscopy tech technicians were also involved in the archiving process every afternoon. It was in this context that the manager of the laboratory, Myriam MARTY-LAGASSE, discovered the FINA solution during the CARREFOUR PATHOLOGIE 2017.
Our head of department, Pr. Pierre BROUSSET, supported the investment project for the FINA solution, in particular because it would allow us to enforce the rules of exit from the blocks, and consequently blocks, guarantee their traceability so blocks are no longer lost.
This problem of loss of blocks or slides seems to be unavoidable when archiving is done manually. How do you explain then that archiving & retrieval automation solutions are still often perceived as “comfort solutions”?
Investment capacity is often limited and anatomopathology laboratories generally favour investments that are directly linked to the delivery of results. But in fact, for large laboratories in particular the automation of archiving / retrieval seems to me unavoidable. As I come from a medical analysis background, I am very aware of the notion of traceability, which is an integral part of the organisation of laboratories, and which has become even more important with the obligation of accreditation. In pathology, the majority of the automatons that are proposed to us have traceability functionalities, it is a notion that is still underdeveloped.
There is no doubt that traceability will become essential in pathology, just as it has become for medical analysis. In order to be in conformity with the regulations in and above all for our patients, we must put this in place to ensure that no block is lost, because each block is precious.
What do you think is important when a laboratory embarks on a project to automate the archiving of blocks or slides?
What seems to me to be most important is to prepare the supplier for the implementation of the new solutions, to quickly remedy any unforeseen problems during the installation, and take the time to train all the staff, especially those particularly those who are not at ease with IT tools.
The team, carried out an inventory of our procedures for archiving & retrieval of blocks. The restitution of this inventory of fixtures allowed us to share a global vision of the different processes and how they would evolve with the integration of of Fina. It was also an opportunity to review certain ways of doing things in order to to optimise the block archiving & retrieving process.
The 2nd thing is the verification of the barcodes of the cassettes and slides. The quality of the barcodes for the different colours must be checked, and make sure that they are read by the archiving & retreival systems.
If you don’t do this beforehand, you risk having too many errors when scanning blocks and slides, which could make the change more difficult.
In addition, we have a procedure in place to check the quality of the barcodes obtained with our engravers on a daily basis.
In our case, we have had difficulties with the IHC slides. Indeed, we have all the IHC machines on the market each with a different type of label and barcode handling different information.
We had to harmonise the content information delivered on each type of label and to get closer to the IHC suppliers to obtain a 2D barcode format.
So you have been using Fina since 2018 and Crystal since 2020, what do you think of these solutions?
We are very satisfied with the solutions themselves as well as the after-sales service and the responsiveness of Dreampath to respond to our requests for improvement.
We would not like to go back to the way things were, even if the doctors find that retrieval the slides is more restrictive than before. Today, we no longer lose blocks or slides and we save a lot of time in archiving them, especially for the slides. A time often equal to one FTE was spent on archiving and can now be reinvested in other on other value-added tasks, such as stock management or inventory management for example. Archiving has become more fluid, we do it we do it as we go along during downtime.
Being able to handle megablocks with Fina and having a better PDA in terms of connection, but I know that you will respond to this request by the end of May.
For Crystal, I think it would be interesting to simplify the archiving process to meet the expectations of our doctors, who want to find the slides of interest as quickly as possible.
Finally, we keep blocks for 30 years and slides for 20 years.
On the Oncopole, we can only keep 1 year and 1⁄2 of blocks and 2 years of slides, the rest being outsourced to a department of the CHU called “LOGIDOS” located at about 10 km from our site. We are therefore also waiting for a solution LOGIDOS” to manage the archiving and retrieval of blocks and slides in the same way as we do, and beyond that an interface that allows us to integrate the notion of outsourced archiving.
What improvements have you identified for Fina and Crystal?
