Introducing Standards and best practice

Being in a clinical setting is quite a challenging area, especially when the area that I’m working is quite new to the NHS. So a lot of the standards that we have to adhere to, are based on existing clinical lab practices. For instance, ISO 1 5 1 8 9, is something that we have to conform to. But more importantly, that has been based on laboratory assessments, and standardization. So we as bioinformaticians have to look at something a little bit further in details. So there’s a lot of standards out there, like 1 3 4 8 5. That’s quite relevant to us.

But also, what we have to do, is to look at what are the best practices we as bioinformaticians across the NHS, rather than as a group based here in Manchester, are actually doing. So we have some best practice guidelines that we’ve agreed upon. And relations validation, validation is quite tricky. Purely because what you’re trying to do with validation is to suggest that you can pick up every event possible within a particular sample. And that gets very challenging when you’re trying to deliver a new service, like in the case of the cataract.

Some of the things that we have to conform with the ISO standards, is to look at whether we have standard operating protocols, whether we are able to track any code bases that we’re changing, for instance, as well. For instance, do we conform to best practices as well? Are we doing audits? So the audit can be either an audit of our bioinformatics process or it could be an audit across many similar processes within our bioinformatic systems. And what that allows us to do is to assess whether we can make any further improvements. And it feeds back to what ISO requires office. But one of the most important orders that you find, is actually your user audits.

And the user audits, quite often, is about how users pursue your systems, and how you can improve your systems based on your users’ needs. And that seems to play quite a heavy part when you’re actually trying to deliver an ISO, or acquired ISO quotation.