Accessioning and the bench

Receiving a delivery

/samples/register — receive a delivery, one accession per tube.

Accessioning is the moment the laboratory takes responsibility for a specimen. It appends one received custody event, and it is the point turnaround is measured from.

One accession per tube. Two tubes from one order get two numbers, because from here they have separate custody and can have separate outcomes.

The accession number

The format is A-YY-NNNNNNN-C: the issue year, a seven-digit sequence held per laboratory, and a check digit.

Two facts about it are load-bearing:

• The number is minted by the database, never by the browser. Two technicians receiving at the same second must not be able to produce the same one.
• The check digit is there to be typed wrong. It exists so a mistyped accession is caught at the point of entry rather than discovered when a result lands on the wrong patient. The same algorithm mints it and re-checks it when it is scanned.

An accession that this laboratory does not hold matches nothing. Nothing is invented to fill the gap — no partial match, no nearest guess.

Scanning onto a bench

/samples/scan — scan tubes onto the bench.

The run starts empty and the log is newest first, because a technician looks at the top of a list and not the bottom of one. A tube already on another bench is reported as such rather than silently moved.

A specimen that was rejected cannot be scanned back onto a bench as though nothing had happened. The refusal lives in the database, not only in the screen that asks.

Next: Labels and barcodes →