How Atlantic Health’s retrofit eliminates specimen management error rates

The journey of a medical specimen from collection to processing in a laboratory is complex, and maintaining the integrity of each one is pivotal. But across most hospital systems, this process is still conducted manually using analog technology. Such processes aren’t inherently bad, yet passing a specimen from one person to the next significantly increases the likelihood of errors. Specimen management errors are rare, overall, but they can have serious consequences for patient safety and organizational liability.

“When a specimen is lost or contaminated because it wasn’t handled properly, this can delay diagnostics, hold up the start of treatment plans, and cause unnecessary patient distress,” says Atlantic Health System EVP, CIDO, and CISO, Sunil Dadlani.

Urgently wanting to eliminate these risks and streamline efficiencies, Atlantic Health needed a digital solution to enhance specimen tracking, reduce errors, and fine-tune diagnostic accuracy.

Back to the drawing board

The first solution put on the table came at a very high cost and was operationally unsustainable because it called for an end-to-end redesign of their infrastructure, and required significant investments in new hardware and software. But rather than scrapping the project, Dadlani and his team went back to the clinical stakeholders to get a better understanding of the problem they were trying to solve.

“You should never start with the technology,” he says. “Seventy percent of finding the right solution is about talking to the right stakeholders so you can define the problem and find the best solution. Is it a data issue, process, or technology issue? Is it a personnel issue? In this case, the heart of the problem was knowing where the specimen was and who the custodian of the specimen was at a specific time.”

With this in mind, they developed a lean tracking system that leveraged existing infrastructure and technologies. “We built a lightweight mobile application that could be used to track a specimen as it moves from one step to another using a barcode scanner,” he says. “It didn’t require any major overhaul or a large amount of money.”

The first prototype was developed over a six-month period and was an iterative process. They leveraged learnings from joint design sessions with clinical staff, lab professionals, and tech teams. They also involved legal and compliance teams to ensure that what they were developing adhered to different regulations. “These sessions were very interactive, so nothing we created was based on theoretical assumptions,” says Dadlani. “It was all about real-world feedback.”

During this process, they quickly realized the value of what they were doing, but the challenge was figuring out how to scale to an enterprise level across different departments and hospital systems. According to Dadlani, this inspired them to make the architecture modular and technology-agnostic.

Attention to detail

It was vital to be sure they weren’t unintentionally increasing work for users while trying to solve the problem. With this in mind, the application had to be simple and seamless to use. Enabling single sign-on and two-factor authentication allowed users to input the same login credentials across different applications and stay logged in. Additionally, building biometrics into the app to speed up authentication was crucial.

“Once you’ve completed your step in the specimen journey, the app automatically sends an alert to the next person down the line letting them know where it is.” But again, says Dadlani, these changes in the process needed to be handled with care. “We were cautious about alert fatigue, as we didn’t want people to be getting so many that they become desensitized, which could then delay their response to critical notifications.”

Success in the lab and beyond

The solution is now live across all operating rooms and seven hospital systems, and is also being used by a large pool of lab team members and clinicians. Plus, since its deployment, there’ve been no lost specimens. By digitizing the specimen journey, they’ve improved turnaround times because of greater visibility, so everybody knows where each specimen is at any given time.

This has also improved coordination between different team members and built strong partnerships between these groups. “Armed with this data, it’s possible to identify other areas for improvement,” he says. “We’re now asking things like how can we improve patient throughput or speed up patient holding times and reduce readmissions. There are so many different areas where we can expand this program to solve some key challenges that every hospital system faces.”

Looking back on the project, which earned Atlantic Health a 2025 CIO 100 Award, Dadlani highlights the importance of always starting with the business problem you’re trying to solve. “First define the problem accurately by talking to relevant stakeholders and ensuring you have an accurate baseline,” he says. “This makes it easier to develop a clear understanding of what success might look like. It’s a partnership, so with the right teams and the right collaboration, there’s a great opportunity for health systems to reimagine and redesign the health care of the future.”