LabLoop: from home sample collection to report delivery, a diagnostic lab chain that stopped losing samples

LabLoop's medical director told us about a patient whose sample had been labelled with another patient's name during a busy morning of home collections. It was caught — but it shook the whole team. Labels were handwritten, samples travelled in cool boxes with paper lists, and nobody could say exactly where a given tube was at any moment.

Customers had their own frustrations: phlebotomists arriving outside their booked slot, and reports arriving by email long after they were ready.

We followed samples from booking to report: slot allocation by phone, a phlebotomist with a paper route, handwritten labels, a courier handover, manual entry at the lab, analysers producing results that were typed into reports. Every hand-off was a chance for error or delay.

In LabLoop, each booking generates barcoded labels printed on a portable printer at the patient's home. The phlebotomist scans each tube against the booking before drawing blood. From then on, every step — handover, receipt at the lab, analyser run — is a scan, and results flow directly from analysers into the report.

Routes are optimised across bookings so phlebotomists arrive within slot. Reports are released the moment a pathologist signs them, to the patient's app and their doctor's portal.

Analyser integration needed an engineer experienced with laboratory interfaces.

Agreed with the medical director and operations head.

Everything that shipped for patients, phlebotomists, the lab and doctors.

We started with home collections in one zone and the central lab, then extended to all zones and satellite labs. Analysers were interfaced one by one, with results double-checked against manual entry until each matched perfectly.

Identify at the source. Barcoding at the patient's door eliminated the most dangerous class of error.

Remove typing wherever possible. Analyser interfacing ended transcription errors in results.