Clinical laboratory professionals have been complaining about staff shortage for more than 30 years. In the U.S alone, more than 13 billion tests are performed in clinical laboratories each year. Even though new tests are being developed to help treat and cure health problems, the number of qualified personnel to administer these tests is rapidly declining.
Lab Automation
Lab automation has become a necessary system in laboratories to reduce manual work. Several big hospitals in the world have implemented lab automation systems in order to reduce turnaround times, overcome staff shortages and meet the quality and traceability requirements. Labs are using robotic instruments in many applications to ensure the safety of the workers and to provide better treatments to the patients.
A couple of years back, manual tasks took up a great deal of a laboratorian’s day. However today, it makes little sense that students who spend several years mastering laboratory testing and pathologies end up working long hours to manually sort thousands of samples and fix equipment. The healthcare industry must implement solutions and automate heavy manual tasks to improve the daily work of laboratory staff and allow them to utilize their critical thinking skills.
Improved Patient Care
Every year medical errors cause hundreds of thousands of deaths. Errors in lab tests lead to faulty diagnosis and inadequate treatments. According to a recent study, most of us will receive at least one wrong diagnosis throughout our lives. With staff shortages come long working hours and increased stress which can lead to human errors and risk of malpractice.
Laboratory tests are an essential part in healthcare since test results largely influence the physician’s decision about the right treatments to their patients. To enhance patient care and improve laboratorians’ working conditions, there should be a focus on improving and expanding automated systems, reducing the risk of human errors and decreasing the throughput time.
Automated sample handling and sorting
Lab automation comprise a number of different parts, including conveyors, robotic systems, machine vision and computer hardware and software. Laboratory automation provides control over the inflow of samples, therefore improving efficiency and productivity, and ensuring prompt results to the patients. Although many hospitals started automating their laboratories in order to cope with staff shortage, provide better patient care and keep laboratorians from doing repetitive tasks, many challenges in the preanalytical phase are not yet solved.
Graniten is collaborating with a number of hospitals to address the issue of how to handle incoming samples from the pneumatic tube system. The process of opening incoming carriers, sorting the samples and placing them in lab systems is both heavy and time consuming. We need innovative solutions that are flexible enough to meet the various demands at different hospitals – taking care of the entire process from receiving carriers to opening, sorting, storing, transporting, and putting vials in lab equipment for testing.
Vestfolf Hospital in Norway is an example of a hospital where we have automated the process of handling incoming samples from the pneumatic tube system to lab machines. The hospital has witnessed an increase of samples (the number of samples doubled in 10 years) and with staff shortage the problem becomes even more serious. But with smart automation, they were able to improve their quality processes, reduce throughput times and therefore giving the patient a faster, better and more accurate treatment. “Our capacity to receive test samples through the pneumatic tube system has improved significantly. We no longer need to stand at the receiving station to handle the incoming tests (…) We are very happy with the solution from Graniten. We continue to have some good input and we are met very positively, and they are responsive to our feedback, something we value highly.” Lise-Gro Moore, Bioengineer specialist at the laboratory of Sykehuset i Vestfold HF.
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