BATON ROUGE — Our Girl of the Lake in Baton Rouge unveiled a brand new piece of know-how Tuesday that can assist ship lab outcomes for sufferers sooner.
“The brand new system is the Abbott GLP Automation line. We’re solely the second website within the state of Louisiana to have this. It’s absolutely electromagnetic, so it would not have shifting components like earlier variations. It’ll deal with roughly 5,000 specimens a day,” OLOL Lab Division Senior Director Jim Teague mentioned.
Teague says that the road performs the routine and repetitive duties in an effort to scale back turnaround time and standardize the method.
“Duties like receiving specimens, the centrifugation of specimens, delivering specimens to the analyzer, and storing the specimens after testing. These are duties which can be beforehand carried out by human beings,” Teague mentioned.
WBRZ requested what the unique course of was like.
“We referred to as it our sneaker community as a result of we had medical laboratory assistants that may obtain the specimens within the pc, after which manually run them within the centrifuge, after which manually place them on the analyzer. Then the scientific laboratory scientist, our degreed members of the workforce, which makes up about sixty p.c of the lab workforce, would then take them off the machine and manually retailer them and must go retrieve them if further testing was ordered,” Teague mentioned.
Teague was requested what sort of specimens and exams the automation line, referred to as the GLP programs Observe, could be for.
“These are exams on your physique chemistries and your organ perform, your electrolytes, therapeutic medication. This line did do the COVID antibody exams, however it does infectious illness testing for hepatitis, HIV,” Teague mentioned.
The vials, also called samples, are loaded right into a loader module. The automation mainly takes care of every thing else, together with placing the vials onto these little car-like robots. The vehicles are on a monitor and take them down the road.
“They know when they should cost, in order that they’ll go to the particular cost lane to cost, after which you may see prefer it transfers the samples wherever it must go, so the vehicles are very sensible,” OLOL Chemistry Supervisor Tina Iyasere mentioned.
The vehicles will take the vials all the way down to particular sections, just like the chemistry analyzer.
“There’s truly a bulk loader that you could simply dump tubes in, and the automation line picks them up, receives them by scanning their bar code, and sends them to the centrifuge when applicable, after which sends all of it the way in which down the road to the chemistry analyzer the place the exams are run. Then after it is accomplished, it goes to a holding bay so if the supplier orders further testing, it is going to retrieve the specimen and run that take a look at and put it again,” Teague mentioned.
Our Girl of the Lake says this new know-how is a part of their dedication to caring for sufferers rapidly and effectively.
“We have been wanting this for over 10 years, so we have been engaged on getting it in for about six months now, and it is up and rocking and rolling for about three weeks,” OLOL Lab Director Susan Gueho mentioned.
