Discover how Hospital Clinic of Barcelona transformed its pre-analytical process with ProTube™

In this webinar, Dr. José Luis Bedini, Core Lab Head at Hospital Clinic of Barcelona, shares his firsthand experience implementing Inpeco’s ProTube™ solution — a compact automation and traceability solution designed to eliminate pre-pre-analytical errors at the point of sample collection.

Joined by Riccardo Melis, Regional Distribution Manager at Inpeco, Dr. Bedini walks through the real-world challenges of managing a high-volume core laboratory in a complex, multi-campus hospital environment, and explains how ProTube™ helped standardize sample collection, reduce errors, and improve patient safety across the entire institution.

What you’ll learn:

• Why the pre-pre-analytical phase is the biggest source of diagnostic errors — and how to address it
• How Hospital Clinic of Barcelona successfully rolled out ProTube™ across all inpatient wards
• The operational and patient safety benefits achieved after implementation
• Practical advice on building the business case and driving change across departments

Presented by Labroots and sponsored by Inpeco.

Webinar Transcript:

Webinar Transcript — Presented by Labroots and Inpeco

Hello everyone and welcome to today’s webinar: ProTube™ — Success Story at Hospital Clinic of Barcelona. My name is Kevin Flug of Labroots and I’m going to be your moderator for today’s event. Today’s educational web seminar is presented by Labroots and brought to you by Inpeco. To learn more about our sponsor, please visit www.inpeco.com.

I would now like to welcome both of our speakers for today’s webinar. Dr. José Luis Bedini, Core Lab Head at Hospital Clinic of Barcelona, associate professor of biochemistry and molecular biology at the University of Barcelona in Spain, and Riccardo Melis, Regional Distribution Manager, East Europe for Inpeco.

About Inpeco

Thank you, Kevin, and thank you all for joining us today. On behalf of Inpeco, it’s my great pleasure to welcome you to this webinar and to have with us Dr. José Luis Bedini, who will share his firsthand experience with the Inpeco solution and how it has helped address key pre-analytical challenges at Hospital Clinic of Barcelona. To begin, I will provide a very brief overview of Inpeco — who we are and what drives our mission.

Inpeco’s journey started with a clear vision from our founder, Gian Andrea Pedrazzini: to improve patient safety by reducing human error in clinical diagnostics through automation in the early 1990s. He introduced the concept of total lab automation, an approach that has since shaped the industry, with many of its original principles still in use today.

Nowadays, Inpeco stands as a global leader in total lab automation, delivering advanced solutions worldwide both directly to end users and through our network of partners. What Inpeco does is develop and manufacture automatic technologies that enable healthcare institutions to control every step of the diagnostic process. Our mission is to support laboratories in improving efficiency, quality, and patient safety through automation, traceability, and continuous innovation.

Today our solutions are installed in more than 2,800 laboratories worldwide and we are present in over 78 countries. This extensive global installed base provides us with strong experience, deep expertise, and a comprehensive understanding of market trends and dynamics.

Challenges Facing Laboratories and Hospitals Today

Today, laboratories and hospitals are facing constant and increasing pressure. An aging population is driving higher demand for diagnostic testing, while the growing prevalence of chronic disease requires more frequent and continuous monitoring. At the same time, the shortage of skilled personnel makes it more and more challenging to manage these rising workloads.

In addition, financial pressure continues to grow, driven by declining reimbursement rates, and workflows are often still fragmented in the hospital, resulting in operational inefficiencies. Patient expectations are also evolving, with a growing demand for faster, more accurate, and more personalized services.

In summary, laboratories and hospitals are increasingly being asked to do more with fewer resources. The key question is: how can they achieve this? At Inpeco, we choose to address this challenge by adopting a holistic approach to the entire diagnostic process. This means bringing automation and traceability across the entire workflow — not only within the laboratory, but also by optimizing everything that happens before it, which today represents the most critical phase — ensuring that every step is fully under control from patient identification to result delivery.

All of this is made possible through the combination of our solution ProTube™ for the pre-analytical phase and our new open automation platform FlexLab™ X within the laboratory. With this overview in mind, I am now pleased to hand over to Dr. José Luis Bedini, who will share his experience at Hospital Clinic of Barcelona.

Hospital Clinic of Barcelona: An Overview

Good morning. First of all, I would like to thank Inpeco for inviting me to share our experience with all the people attending the webinar. My email address is jlbedini@clinic.cat — please feel free to send me an email or visit our lab if you are in Barcelona.

I want to start by sharing some details about our hospital. Hospital Clinic is located right in the middle of the city of Barcelona. This central location is actually one of our key challenges: we do not have space to grow. The hospital is a very old building dating from the end of the 19th century and we are totally surrounded by the city. When the hospital first opened, there was nothing around it — just farmers, fields, and forests. Now you can see that it is completely encircled by the urban environment.

The hospital is not just one site. In fact, we have three campuses belonging to Hospital Clinic. The first is the Maternitat Campus, dedicated to mother and child care, ophthalmology, and day surgery. The second is the Platò Campus, which was integrated into Clinic in 2021. The third is the Villarroel Campus, our main site where the core laboratory is located. Overall, we have approximately 800 beds and serve around 500,000 patients per year.

Our core laboratory is one of the largest in Spain, processing around 18 million parameters per year, equivalent to approximately 50,000 parameters per day. We work with a wide range of analyzers covering clinical chemistry, immunology, hematology, coagulation, microbiology, and more.

Pre-Analytical Challenges and the Decision to Automate

The pre-analytical phase represents the biggest source of errors in laboratory medicine, accounting for up to 70% of all diagnostic errors. For us at Hospital Clinic, the main pre-analytical issues were related to patient identification, tube labeling errors, wrong tube selection, and inadequate sample quality. These errors led to repeated blood draws, delayed results, and in some cases, potential patient harm.

Our hospital has a complex logistics structure, with samples being collected across multiple wards and campuses and transported to the central laboratory. This complexity made manual control of the pre-analytical phase extremely challenging. We needed a solution that could bring structure, traceability, and standardization to this process — and that is where ProTube™ came in.

Before implementing ProTube™, the process of collecting blood samples at the bedside was largely manual and depended heavily on the experience and training of nursing staff. Nurses had to know which tubes to select, the correct filling order, and patient identification protocols. Errors were common, particularly with temporary or substitute nursing staff who were less familiar with the procedures.

ProTube™: How It Works

ProTube™ is a bedside solution developed by Inpeco that guides nurses through the sample collection process step by step. The system is integrated with the hospital information system and the laboratory information system, enabling real-time access to test orders at the point of care.

When a nurse arrives at a patient’s bedside to collect a blood sample, they log in to the ProTube™ terminal and scan the patient’s wristband. The system immediately identifies the patient and displays all pending blood test orders. It then guides the nurse through the correct tube selection, showing exactly which tubes are needed and in what order they should be filled — following the correct draw order to avoid cross-contamination.

Each tube is labeled automatically at the bedside, eliminating the risk of pre-labeling errors or tube mix-ups. The system also checks the patient’s identity at every step, ensuring that the right sample is collected from the right patient. Once the collection is complete, the system registers the samples in the LIS in real time, so the laboratory knows that the samples are on their way before they even arrive.

One of the most powerful features of ProTube™ is its ability to work even in complex hospital environments with multiple wards and campuses. At Hospital Clinic, we deployed the system across all inpatient areas, integrating it seamlessly with our existing IT infrastructure.

Implementation at Hospital Clinic of Barcelona

The implementation of ProTube™ at Hospital Clinic of Barcelona was a major project involving the laboratory, the nursing department, hospital management, and the IT department. From the beginning, we understood that this was not just a technology project — it was a change management project.

Communication was absolutely critical. We needed to convince hospital managers, ward nurses, and nursing heads of the benefits of the system. One of the key success factors was having a dedicated project champion on the nursing side: Miss Hayen, the head of nurses in our laboratory, who was absolutely brilliant in driving the change. She organized meetings, informed the nursing staff across all wards, and personally came in many mornings at 5:00 a.m. to train nurses on the new system.

We rolled out the system in phases, starting with a pilot ward before expanding across the hospital. This phased approach allowed us to learn and adjust before the full deployment. Training was made much simpler by ProTube™ itself: whereas before, training a new nurse to collect samples correctly required two to three days, with ProTube™ we can train a nurse in just a few minutes. The system guides them through the entire process intuitively.

The project required close collaboration between Inpeco and our internal teams. The technical integration between ProTube™ and our hospital and laboratory information systems was a key challenge that was successfully resolved through a structured implementation process.

Results and Impact

The results achieved since the implementation of ProTube™ have been remarkable. We have seen a dramatic reduction in pre-analytical errors, particularly in the areas of patient misidentification and wrong tube selection. The rate of sample rejection due to pre-analytical errors has fallen significantly, reducing the need for repeated blood draws and improving the overall patient experience.

From a quality perspective, the system has brought a new level of standardization and traceability to our sample collection process. Every sample collected through ProTube™ is fully tracked from the moment it is drawn to the moment it arrives in the laboratory, providing complete chain-of-custody documentation.

The benefits extend well beyond the laboratory itself. The wards and clinical departments that rely on laboratory results have experienced faster turnaround times and greater confidence in the reliability of results. Patient safety has improved because the risk of a diagnostic error stemming from a mislabeled or wrong sample has been drastically reduced.

Nursing staff satisfaction has also improved. Although there was initial resistance to change — as is natural with any significant process change — nurses have embraced the system once they experienced its benefits firsthand. The system removes ambiguity from the collection process and gives nurses confidence that they are doing things correctly.

From a financial perspective, the reduction in errors translates into real cost savings: fewer repeated blood draws, fewer unnecessary follow-up tests, and less time spent troubleshooting pre-analytical problems. While it is difficult to quantify the full cost of non-quality in financial terms — because some of the costs are measured in patient outcomes rather than euros — the business case for ProTube™ is clear when you consider both the visible and the hidden costs of pre-analytical errors.

Broader Reflections on Pre-Analytical Quality

Looking back at the journey we have been through at Hospital Clinic, I think it is important to reflect on what we have learned. The pre-analytical phase has for too long been the neglected part of the diagnostic process. In the analytical phase — the part that happens inside the laboratory — we have achieved tremendous improvements in quality over the past decades through standardization, automation, and accreditation. But errors were still happening, and they were happening before the sample even arrived at the laboratory.

The investment in pre-analytical automation through ProTube™ has allowed us to extend that same level of quality control to the bedside. I think of it as completing the quality loop: ensuring that the entire diagnostic journey, from the moment the test is ordered to the moment the result is delivered, is under control.

I am reminded of the spirit of exploration and ambition that drives great endeavors — like the Artemis missions pushing the boundaries of space travel. In our own field, we have embarked on an epic journey of innovation and quality improvement. We have shifted our focus from the analytical phase — which we had largely mastered — to the pre-analytical phase, where the majority of errors still occur. And by doing so, we are genuinely improving the care we provide to our patients.

If I were to give one piece of advice to colleagues considering a similar project, it would be this: frame it around quality and non-quality. Quality is visible — you can measure it in your quality controls and your processes. But non-quality has hidden costs that are much harder to quantify: unnecessary repeat tests, delayed diagnoses, and most importantly, potential harm to patients. Make these hidden costs visible to your hospital management, and the case for investment becomes compelling.

Q&A Session

Following the presentations, a live Q&A session was held. Selected questions and answers are summarized below.

Question: Now that you have achieved such a high level of sample security, what additional operational improvements have you observed within the laboratory and more broadly in other hospital departments following the implementation of ProTube™?

Dr. Bedini: The benefits of ProTube™ are actually more significant for departments outside the laboratory. When we collect wrong samples, the bad result is produced in the lab, but the consequences are felt by the patient who is located in the wards. The nurses, for example — before ProTube™, training a new nurse to collect samples required two or three days because they needed to know the right tube, the correct draw order, and everything involved. Now with ProTube™, we can train nurses in just a few minutes. So I think ProTube™ is an initiative that comes from the laboratory but ultimately benefits the wards and the patients.

Question: Your project demonstrates strong collaboration across multiple departments. What was the key factor that made implementation successful?

Dr. Bedini: Communication. The only way to succeed in such a complex project is communication. You need to be able to convince hospital managers, nurses, and nursing heads of the benefits of the project. And you need a leading person from the lab side. In our story, that was Miss Hayen, the head of nurses in our laboratory. She organized all the meetings, informed the nursing staff, and came many mornings at 5:00 a.m. to teach nurses. You need both a strong leader and a robust communication strategy to achieve cooperation from the wards.

Question: Given the current pressure on hospital budgets, what would you recommend as the first step to start a conversation with hospital management when proposing solutions like this?

Dr. Bedini: Quality — and specifically non-quality. It is all about quality, but I would say it is really about non-quality. When we have errors in the pre-analytical phase, we incur non-quality costs: more phlebotomist time, bad diagnoses, unnecessary complementary tests. It is difficult to help managers understand this because the costs of non-quality are often invisible. Everyone easily understands the visible costs of quality — quality controls, processes you can measure. But the cost of non-quality is much harder to evaluate. Sometimes the cost of non-quality is the health of the patient, and that is very difficult to quantify in euros or dollars. We convinced our hospital managers by making both visible and invisible quality costs tangible — and by emphasizing that non-quality has costs that sometimes cannot be measured in money, but in health.

Closing

Thank you to Dr. José Luis Bedini and Riccardo Melis for their informative and insightful presentations. Thank you also to Labroots for hosting this event and to Inpeco for underwriting today’s educational webcast. Questions that we did not have time to address during the live session will be followed up by Inpeco directly or by Inpeco’s local representative. This webcast is also available on demand — Labroots will alert you via email when it is available for replay.