Empowered Patient Podcast Healthcare Lab Sample Logistics and Need to Identify and Eliminate Errors with Javier Cuello H+Trace
Javier Cuello, Founder and CEO of H+Trace highlights the significant and often overlooked problem of errors in the handling of medical samples. Issues like mislabeling, contamination, and improper shipping conditions are responsible for a majority of lab result errors, potentially leading to patient misdiagnoses. The H+Trace solution uses wireless sensors and AI to track samples, generate high-value data, and predict where errors are likely to occur. Working in Latin America and Central America has provided the company with experience in utilizing drones for shipping medical samples and organs to remote and hard-to-reach areas, while maintaining sample integrity.
Javier explains, "It all started for me when a very close friend of mine was misdiagnosed with diabetes while she was pregnant. And when I started digging into this problem, what we found out is that most lab tests today are highly reliable. Once the sample reaches the analyzer, the real danger lies in the logistics of collecting, labeling, and transporting samples prior to that. While not every mistake hurts, the patient studies showed that about 2% to 5% of errors are clinically significant, and this means over 9,000 patients every day in the US risk misdiagnosis, late treatment, and unnecessary procedures or even life-threatening consequences, all because of failures in the pre-analytic logistics."
"It's a quite new problem because over the past decades, laboratories have invested heavily in laboratory equipment and training, but the logistics of sample handling have seen little innovation. That is why roughly two-thirds of errors still occur in the pre-analytical phase."
"But the reality is that most laboratories don't even know under what conditions the transport takes place. Even some of the most important labs simply receive the sample processing and send the results. So we're working with a laboratory that addresses this kind of problem, which started with labor. They have their own logistics. We started in Latin America and Central America, and now we're about to launch in the US because this is a very big problem in the US."
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