Introduction

Reliably receiving laboratory results is mission critical for both doctors and medical facilities (hospitals and especially their ICUs). Bluebird is the most reliable service a lab can provide to ensure their clients receive all their electronic results, on time, with a minimum of fuss.

Even large pathology groups with large IT resources typically do not actively manage this process to conclusion and it is not cost effective for smaller laboratories to try.

Active management of this process as well as providing a single pipe (API) for all results, irrespective of the laboratory, is what differentiates Bluebird from all other lab result services in Southern Africa.

Our unblemished 30 year history as well as our near real time service have made Bluebird the trusted lab result service. So trusted that during the pandemic, the NDoH contracted Bluebird to be the conduit for every Covid result from every lab in South Africa. Not only are we able to actively manage the process, we can do this safely and at a massive scale! Why would your lab wish to take on this medico-legal liability when Bluebird is an established, trusted, cost effective service?

Ensuring that each lab result ordered is received, protecting patient privacy, normalizing data and actively managing the process so that every laboratory your doctors use is included are tasks that Bluebird has managed flawlessly for almost 30 years. Bluebird has received international recognition for their service, first in 2007 from the American Academy of Family Medicine and most recently from the Leading Hospital Safety Network based at Imperial College London. That lecture is available here: intelms.com/495


  • Active management means that every lab result sent by a laboratory is reliably made available to the person/facility that ordered that laboratory test and that process is proactively managed. Bluebird Active Management includes:

    1.Monitoring that the laboratory’s communication systems are up 24/7.
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    2.Having a support service staffed 24/7 to notify the laboratory if their system or their comms go down.

    3.Managing test codes for example if a new test (with a new test code) is sent, Bluebird will quarantine that result, phone the lab that sent it and then ensure that data can be normalized (i.e. converted to a common code that all labs sending that result will map to). This service needs to be available 24/7 to prevent mission critical results being delayed or in this case unable to be interpreted by the doctors/hospital software

    4.The Bluebird service is constantly monitored and managed 24/7, 365 day a year.

    5.An audit process ensures that every result each lab believes they have sent is reconciled to ensure that it was received by Bluebird and if any result fails this reconciliation Bluebird staff immediately contact the lab and ensure that result is resent. Over 3 decades Bluebird has not yet lost a lab result!

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    100 million medical records were stolen in the US in 2016 and it has only got worse. Hospitals and Labs typically face increasingly serious shortages of skilled IT professionals, professionals who are able properly deal with cyber intrusions.

    Bluebird not only uses state of the art privacy safeguards but has made a significant investment in people and in systems specifically built to house sensitive information. [[ image ]] pic These servers reside in an extremely secure area that is monitored 24/7 and uses multiple layers of redundancy to ensure power, cooling and connectivity remain operational, even under exceptional circumstances.

    Patient confidentiality has been the cornerstone of our business for more than 25 years.

    From the very beginning we designed Bluebird to meticulously protect a patient's clinical information.

    Our unblemished track record speaks for itself.
    In 2005, our medical director was invited to Dallas to present a lecture detailing our unique experience to the American Academy of Family Practice.

    In 2008, Bluebird installed a pilot project at the University of California that required stringent HIPAA compliance.

    In 2022 we were invited to present the work we did for the NDoH to the Leading Hospital Safety Network based at Imperial College London. That lecture is available here: intelms.com/495 and here is a link to our published security document: intelms.com/1i

  • There are no Setup fees and no minimum monthly fee. Practically this means that labs sending a smaller volume experience significant savings by not having to develop and maintain their own infrastructure to deliver electronic reports to doctors.

    No fee is charged to send reports to Bluebird enabled hospitals (Bluebird contracts with the hospital to cover the cost).
    The sending Lab is billed for results sent to doctors at R5.92 (excluding VAT) per lab report (note not per lab test).

    This 2023 figure rises each year by the published COL index.

  • To enable Southern African Laboratories to securely send results to their doctors via Bluebird, the lab’s IT department needs to implement these 3 steps:

    1.The lab result files need to be formatted either as HL7, or XML preferably as Bluebird XML. Please refer to the HL7 and Bluebird XML report specifications at intelms.com/lab.

    2.These files need to be transferred to Bluebird in near real-time. There are two options:
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    1.Web Service. The best option for sending the reports to Bluebird is to upload them via our Web Service. The WSDL for the web service is available here: https://zeus.intelms.com/Receiver/?wsdl. The SendReport method must be called with a username and password and the XML report as a string. The web service will return either "OK: Report received" or "ERROR: …". The Watchdog method of the Bluebird web service needs to be called every 5 minutes so that we can monitor for networking problems between the lab and our systems. The Watchdog method is called with the same username and password as the SendReport method. If for some reason, it is not possible to make use of the web service, we provide a free uploader to securely transfer the files from a directory on your server.

    2.The Bluebird Uploader - this is a Bluebird App that will sit in your data centre and pool a directory for new files (in either HL7 or XML formats), encrypt those files and then securely send them to the Bluebird Cloud. The Bluebird Uploader is typically used by smaller labs that do not have an in-house IT staff that would be able to use the Bluebird Web Service.

    3.A Daily Audit Report needs to be sent to Bluebird via e-mail so that we can ensure that all results produced by the lab on the previous day were received by Bluebird. The daily audit report should include the reports of the previous 24 hours that were sent to Bluebird. Here is an example of the audit report:
    intelms.com/BBAuditSpec.csv. It should be sent via e-mail as an attachment to recon@bluebird.co.za every morning at 6AM and the email Subject should be “[LabName] Recon”. Sending this daily audit report ensures that all labs that you believe were sent by your systems were received and are in the relevant doctors Bluebird inbox.