Fleury Diagnostics: A Brazilian Lab Powerhouse

I want to call your attention to Fleury Diagnostics which started in 1926 in Sao Paulo, Brazil, as a clinical laboratory and evolved into a multi-specialty diagnostic enterprise. Here is the Fleury web site.

Fleury offers more than 2,000 different types of diagnostic tests, in addition to CP and AP. These include nuclear medicine, radiology, cardiology, neurology, otorhynolaringology, urology, pneumology, endoscopies, bronchoscopies, hysteroscopies, and tests in fetal medicine. Fleury has a staff of 270 physicians and a total of 1,600 employees.

Lab test ordering in Brazil is different than in the U.S. The physician initiates the test order but the patient decides which lab to submit the requisition to. Test results are delivered back to the patient and not to the physician.  As a result, many Brazilian labs tend to be very consumer-oriented. Fleury, for example, prides itself on limiting the wait-time for a customer to have a blood specimen drawn to a few minutes.

Rogerio Rabelo, MD, PhD, MBA, is the Director of New Business for Fleury and a frequent lecturer at U.S. lab meetings, particularly on ISO standards. He presented a lecture on this topic at the AACC annual meeting last July. Here is the AACC conference brochure for 2005.

Below is a summary of his presentation at the IQLM 2005 conference from the Medscape web page. Bold face emphasis is mine. Here also is the link to the proceedings of the IQLM 2005 conference at which he spoke for those who want a quick review of lab quality issues.

Approaching quality improvement from a systems perspective also showed promise. Rogerio Rabelo, MD, PhD, MBA, described how Fleury Diagnostics, a privately owned, full-service, high-volume laboratory in São Paulo, Brazil, developed an integrated management system using the international quality management and environmental management standards ISO 9001 and ISO 14001, respectively. The benefits included process standardization for more efficiency and effective management, better control over documents and records, cost reduction, continual improvement as measured by a dynamic set of indicators, and compliance with environmental requirements and pollution control. Quality indicators were merged with other business and customer satisfaction indicators to create a balanced score card for ongoing measurement against goals.