What laboratory turnaround time measures
"Turnaround time" sounds like one number, but it's really a few intervals stacked together. A specimen can be slow because it sat at the clinic before pickup, because it waited at receiving, or because it waited for a run on the analyzer. A single total hides which one it was.
Track My Test reports three intervals for every specimen:
| Interval | From | To | What it tells you |
|---|---|---|---|
| Collection to receipt | Collected | Received | How long transport and courier hand-offs take |
| Receipt to completion | Received | Complete | How long the specimen spends inside your lab |
| Collection to completion | Collected | Complete | The total wait, the number a patient or clinician feels |
On top of those, it shows the time spent in each step of your own process. If you define steps like Received, Placed on rack, Testing and Results approved, you can see exactly which step is where the time goes.
Average, median and 90th percentile
For each interval, Track My Test shows the average, the median and the 90th percentile. They answer different questions, and the difference matters. Here's an example with ten specimens and their total turnaround in hours:
18, 20, 21, 22, 22, 23, 24, 26, 30, 52
- Average: add them up (258) and divide by 10: 25.8 hours. The one 52-hour specimen pulls it up, so the average looks worse than what most specimens experienced.
- Median: the middle value. With ten numbers, it's halfway between the 5th and 6th (22 and 23): 22.5 hours. This is the typical specimen.
- 90th percentile: the time that 90% of specimens beat. Using the nearest-rank method, that's the 9th of 10 values:30 hours. This shows how slow the slow end is.
If the median is steady but the 90th percentile is creeping up, most specimens are fine but more of them are getting stuck somewhere. That can be an early sign of a staffing gap, a courier problem or a backlog at one step.
A live dashboard instead of a monthly report
Many labs calculate turnaround time once a month, from a spreadsheet export, after the problems have already happened. The Track My Test dashboard updates as scans happen and shows:
- Specimens at each step, so you can see a pile-up forming at receiving or on a rack.
- Shipments in transit, with their expected arrival.
- Overdue specimens: anything that has been in a step longer than that step's target time.
- Expiring specimens from your freezer inventory.
Target times for each step
Each step in your process can have an optional target time, such as "received within 24 hours of shipping" or "on a rack within an hour of receipt". Targets are set by your lab, not by Track My Test. Once a specimen passes a target, it shows as overdue, which turns a turnaround goal into a list of specific specimens someone can go and find.
Why scans give better turnaround data
Turnaround time is only as accurate as the timestamps behind it. When times are typed into a log afterward, they're often rounded or estimated. When each step is a barcode scan, the time is recorded the moment it happens, along with who scanned it. And because past events can't be edited, the numbers can't be tidied up after the fact.
Share status without sharing results
A lot of phone calls to a lab are some version of "is it done yet?". If you choose to, you can give patients a status page that shows where their sample is (Collected, In transit, At the lab, Testing, Complete) with times. It never shows results.
You can also ask turnaround questions in plain English, like "what's our turnaround this week?", through the read-only AI connection.