Every day, laboratory medicine professionals change healthcare for the better by providing vital insight that helps people get the care they need. ADLM supports this work by providing those professionals with the most up-to-date recommendations on laboratory best practices from its Academy of Diagnostics and Laboratory Medicine.
The Implementation Stories Contest highlights that work, rewarding laboratory medicine professionals who have made a positive impact on their institutions by implementing an Academy recommendation. This year’s winner is Jayagandan Jayamani, MBBS, MD, FRCPath, CPP, SC, and his team at the New Mowasat Hospital in Kuwait. They will be recognized at ADLM 2026 at the
Academy Networking Coffee Break on July 27 and at the
Academy Annual Membership Meeting and Awards Luncheon on July 29.
Jayamani and his team were honored for their work in following the Academy’s 2020 guidance document on management of point-of-care testing (POCT) — specifically, for adhering to its requirements for structured interdisciplinary POCT governance, comprehensive quality management, and ongoing monitoring of POCT performance indicators.
Jayamani’s team used the guidance to redesign their POCT quality design system to align with best practices. “[The document] helped us move from a basic, functioning POCT setup to a much more structured and standardized program,” Jayamani said.
Although his organization already had a process in place, different locations were doing things in slightly different ways, Jayamani said. The guidance document showed the organization what well-governed POCT really looked like, especially when it came to quality monitoring, risk management, and accountability.
“What stood out most for us was the emphasis on interdisciplinary involvement and continuous performance monitoring,” he said. The guidance led them to streamline audits, introduce structured KPIs (key performance indicators), and create a single quality framework that all POCT locations could follow consistently.
Implementing the guidance was an interdisciplinary effort, involving teams from nursing, the laboratory, biomedical engineering, and clinical leadership. The team made sure that committee members remained active participants in the project. If someone couldn’t be involved anymore, they were replaced with equivalent representatives to ensure uninterrupted multidisciplinary participation and a quorum during meetings, Jayamani said.
One of the biggest changes they made was integrating data from diverse sources. “Some things were in emails, some in Excel sheets — and sometimes issues were just discussed verbally,” Jayamani said. That meant they didn’t have one clear overview of how the POCT program was performing. To fix that, the team created a consolidated KPI system where all important audit and quality points could be monitored together.
“Once we started doing that, the whole approach became much more proactive,” he said. That’s because departments could see trends, identify recurring issues, and work on improvements before problems escalated.
This project forced the organization to confront issues that had crept up over time, such as lack of standardization and visibility across the POCT program and more than 60 POCT sites. Coordinating across so many departments made the team realize that their problems were usually the result of broken or ineffective communication rather than technical issues, Jayamani said. That insight inspired the team to focus on building a stronger communication framework that they could use to address problems as they arose, such as supply chain issues and resource-management anomalies.
Another big shift they made from implementing the ADLM guidance involved the team making it a practice to audit a minimum of 10 locations during each audit cycle, with mandatory inclusion of high-risk and high-volume areas like the neonatal intensive care unit, adult and pediatric emergency rooms, and diabetes triage. “That helped ensure continuous oversight in the most critical patient areas,” Jayamani said.
They also made sure that POCT device training and other activities were supportive rather than just audit-driven. During monthly desktop audits, when quality control logs and records were submitted to the laboratory, they added small encouragements on sticky notes, with comments like “Job well done,” “Logs were maintained,” and “Keep it up!”
“It may sound simple, but the nursing teams genuinely appreciated it and saw it as recognition for their effort and dedication, which really helped build a positive quality culture,” Jayamani said.
Jen A. Miller is a freelance journalist who lives in Audubon, New Jersey. +Bluesky: @byjenamiller.bsky.social.
