Specialized Healthcare and Medical Education Department (SHC&MED) has given PHIMC a mandate to improve pathology laboratory services across Lahore and Multan. The mandate demands some radical changes in the operational model to ensure efficient, effective, high quality, reliable and auditable laboratory services of international standards consistent across tertiary care hospitals of the region. Currently, hospital labs are performing maximum 171 types of tests – while facing several challenges in the current system, including missing samples, missing lab reports, delay in reporting, substandard quality and unreliability of test results as well as lack of transparency and auditability etc.
To address the above shortcomings a centralized pathology laboratory (separate in Lahore and Multan) is envisioned, which would be operated by an outsourced contractor. This centralized pathology laboratory would be connected with the 17 hospitals in Lahore and 3 hospitals in Multan. Further, an additional volume of OPD tests from 6 hospitals from South Punjab would also be brought to the central laboratory of Multan. The urgent lab tests would be performed by the current hospital labs; whereas all other routine lab test samples would be transported to the centralized laboratory.
These laboratories shall be equipped with state of the art technology that would enable the contractor to carry out 314 types of clinical tests, following international pathology standards i.e. ISO 15189, with 24/7 service and a roll out the results online for the users in comparatively short span of time.