Successes in UK/NHS

While X-Lab have been operating in the UK since 2006, the last two years have been full of dramatic changes and growth for the company. X-Lab has the keen appetite for growth, eye for opportunities, and flexible scalability of a start-up. As they continue to grow, they’re looking to expand through both the diversity of their product offering in the UK and the geographic reach to global markets, notably in the US. Ultimately, X-Lab’s vision is to be the leader in connecting the world's diagnostic systems to improve healthcare for all. X-Lab’s core product, Labgnostic, is a cloud-based service which connects diagnostic organisations (primarily pathology labs) together through a single exchange hub. Labgnostic - which is currently marketed under NPEx (the National Pathology Exchange) in the UK - has become the market leader in the UK and has played a key role in the UK’s pandemic response by matching requests and results for the majority of the country’s COVID-19 tests. When COVID-19 hit the UK in March 2020, Labgnostic was nationally mandated to be used for all externally referred and resulted SARS-COV-2 tests in NHS laboratories by NHS England, NHS Improvement and NHSx. The X-Lab team began a fast-paced and intense national roll-out aimed to onboard all remaining NHS labs and within a month and, with a lot of hard work, were able to deliver the service to 45 new labs and 80 new systems connections. Pre-pandemic, X-Lab had 80% UK NHS coverage for Labgnostic and, as a result of the mandate, 100% of NHS England, Scotland, and Wales are connected to the network and able to experience the benefits of the UK’s only truly systems-agnostic diagnostic healthcare data exchange hub. This implementation reduced result turnaround times from days to hours for lab testing for COVID-19. Labs were now able to track their samples through Labgnostic, access clear audit trails, and real time visibility of sample status and location. Human error was removed from the referral and reporting process which made for cleaner test data and accurate results. As a result of Labgnostic, patients receive their results sooner and clinicians could make faster decisions. A study with the Mater Misericordiae University Hospital in Dublin revealed that Labgnostic reduced the turnaround time for a pathology test by an average of 104 days. This type of efficiency and patient safety wasn’t just provided to NHS labs during COVID-19. NHS labs were part of ‘Pillar 1’ formed a key part of the UK’s national testing response, but X-Lab was involved in all five pillars ranging from national-scale population testing, to national surveillance and antibody testing. Most notably, Labgnostic acted as the data infrastructure for ‘Pillar 2: Commercial Swab Testing’ which provided tests and results to the whole of the UK’s population. The service aggregated test request IDs, patient data, and COVID-19 results and ensured that they were passed into UKHSA, the NHS Business Services Authority (who send the results to patients), NHS Digital, and systems which send them on to GP records. Since January 2021, Labgnostic has processed over 450 million COVID-19 test results through Pillar 2. Since helping form the national testing scheme in 2020, X-Lab have migrated their Labgnostic Pillar 2 platform into the Cloud; this ensured a service which was efficient, highly-available, prioritised security and data governance, increased redundancy and reduced latency. The migration also allowed us to elastically scale the service when COVID-19 test volumes were at their highest, during infection peaks, and ensured that people all over the UK have been able to receive their results in the fastest possible time frame no matter the demand for tests.