This webinar series has taken participants from defining their customers and demonstrating how to establishing two way relationships with them, to developing business rules and case acceptance practices, and optimizing the flow of work in the laboratory. Each of these process improvements will lead to gains, but one significant obstacle that still remains is the lack of standardization in the approach to backlog management. Even something as basic as the lack of standardized definitions often precludes a full understanding of the backlog problem when comparing different laboratory systems.
Currently the state of New York is served by 19 different publicly funded crime laboratories on the state, county, and municipal level ranging in size from operations with three staff members to operations with over 350 and very different customer bases and case volumes. This presentation will describe New York’s efforts to develop a Technical Working Group on Backlog Reduction (TWGback) that will seek to standardize the way backlog is defined in the state and develop best practices that New York Crime Laboratories can use to address backlogs in a comprehensive manner.