CAP TODAY Pathology/Laboratory Medicine/Laboratory Management
Sean Roberts, automation is impossible without great information technology riding alongside. Isn’t that right?
Sean Roberts, senior product manager, chemistry/immunoassay business, Beckman Coulter: Absolutely. When I think of the middleware and how you run the automation, there is that level at the laboratory and the user, but there is also an administrative layer, and perhaps even an organizational layer, that’s necessary in terms of the information provided to various end users of these products.
Some of these implementations are becoming increasingly complex when hospital networks buy other hospitals. For example, in one implementation of 30 hospitals, we had four EMRs and about six lab information systems that all needed to connect and communicate because the chief of the system was interested in understanding the entire system as opposed to compartmentalizing in the network. So we’re also seeing a significant increase in the complexity of the implementation and the level of information our customers are expecting from our systems.
Mike Massei, can we get a comment from you on the IT issues?
Mike Massei, senior director, global marketing, core diagnostics portfolio innovation and strategy, Abbott: Our AlinIQ solution is a part of our total solution and will continue to be a focus as a value driver not only within the laboratory but also outside the laboratory with the clinicians. It can help the laboratory and institution deliver on their KPIs, and from an integrated clinical care and patient outcome perspective, its informatics tools can help the clinician so that collectively the health care ecosystem is working smartly.
I want to turn to the question of laboratory labor. I have heard more comments in the past year about the labor shortage than perhaps at any other time. The question I have for our IVD and IT vendors is: Do you still have a significant margin where your automation and your solutions can help with the labor shortage? For example, labor-saving automation, connectivity—do we still have a long way to go there or are we approaching a point where we’re going to say we can only do so much but then eventually we will hit a dead end and the labor shortage is just going to be severe and we’ll have to find other solutions? It’s a provocative question. Let me start with Sean Roberts.
Sean Roberts (Beckman Coulter): It’s not provocative. That is the feedback we get regularly from our customers—labor shortage, labor savings. At Beckman Coulter we recently launched the DxA 5000 Fit, which offers the full feature set of our larger automation systems for the central or core lab but more configurable and sized for the mid-volume and small-hospital laboratories. And one of the features of the Beckman Coulter line is to be able to incorporate clinical chemistry, immunoassay, hematology, and coagulation all on one line, so fewer operators are needed. We’re moving those high-end features available to central labs as far down market as possible to address the labor shortage.
Denise, do you feel you still have a good deal of runway at Siemens to improve the productivity of what laboratorians are doing and help to bridge some of this acute worker shortage?
Denise Pastore (Siemens Healthineers): I do, and we are still pursuing that. Automation used to be for the big labs, but now, as Sean said, the dynamic we’re living with is that we have to keep driving automation and automation features down within the midsize and lower-volume analyzers, and that’s what we’re doing.
Greiner
Brittany, I’m sure you’re in agreement with your colleagues on that one.
Brittany Greiner (Roche): Yes, and I think there are two parts to it. First is that Roche is unique in the market in that it is one manufacturer that provides your automation, analytics, IT solution, and reagents. We’re helping to simplify. Everything is designed to work together, and that means it is easier on your operators.
Second, we do market research frequently so we’ve been hearing this for years, and we have been funneling that back to our R&D globally. What we heard is ease of use and doing more with fewer people, and so we innovated with our Cobas systems and did a lot of self-operating things in the background while the system is running that help simplify the day-to-day for the operators—less maintenance, fewer reagent loading events, fewer calibration events, for example.
Dr. Grenache
Would anyone else like to offer a comment or ask a question as we come to a close?
Dr. Grenache (TriCore): Insurers have asked us to figure out ways in which patients could have access to laboratory services more easily than by the traditional routes, and I’m assuming we’re not unique in being asked to figure out how to facilitate home-based collections, at least for selected tests used to monitor chronic conditions. Does anyone on the call have a perspective on this, or has anyone heard something similar from customers or clients?
Curt Johnson (Orchard): Some of the unique efforts we have seen have revolved around the universities and campuses. How do you get college students, who are social animals and don’t necessarily use the health care system on a regular basis, to understand the need for testing and get it done? Some of the universities offered premade kits that were held in dorm rooms so they would be ready for the students. Others, if the university was small enough, had a barcode for that specific patient, with the whole kit ready to go. Others had to set up the testing and offered five or six different places across campus for it.
Other COVID testing labs joined in and tried to do near-patient testing, with different levels of effectiveness, but the colleges and universities had the most unique situations that we saw. Some of those are likely to stick as we move forward.