A Lean alternative to total laboratory automation

The management system referred to as Lean originated in Japan in the 1950s and was developed by Toyota over subsequent decades. A fundamental goal of Lean is to achieve a continuous flow of work through a process. Batch processing is inherently inefficient, causing delays and bottlenecks. Simply by applying Lean to improve work flow, dramatic improvements to productivity and quality can be achieved. Consequently, over recent years, Lean principles have been applied to almost all manufacturing, commercial and public sectors, including healthcare.

As a single pathology service operating from five laboratories over 2000 square miles and providing a service to over one million inhabitants, Path Links has fully embraced Lean principles in its daily clinical laboratory routines to realise many efficiency and productivity gains. This article will briefly describe Lean principles and focus on its practical application from the experiences of this large hospital laboratory group.

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Improving quality, increasing staff productivity, and reducing costs are challenges typically driving clinical laboratories towards higher levels of automation. Particularly in the blood sciences of clinical chemistry and haematology, there is a bewildering spectrum of equipment available, ranging from discrete automation (across the pre-analytical, analytical, and post-analytical phases), through modular systems linked by tracks, to fully robotic total laboratory automated solutions.