Beckman Coulter has announced the European launch of the DxA 5000 Fit, a workflow automation solution designed to fit into medium-sized laboratories that run fewer than 5000 tests a day.
The clinical laboratory has gone through trial by fire in 2020, where total testing was 245% of baseline volumes, with ~55% being SARS-CoV-2 molecular tests. Despite vaccines, many industry players suggest SARS-CoV-2 testing volumes will not be impacted in the near-term, and the demand for COVID-19-related testing will continue through 2021 and potentially into 2022. This means that testing-volume pressure on laboratories is going to continue.
Laboratories of all sizes are facing the same challenges: shortage of laboratory staff, historic financial pressures on hospitals and health systems, and physically and mentally exhausted laboratory professionals – a pre-pandemic problem that has since been exacerbated. However, the TLA solutions that cater to laboratories processing high-sample volumes are out of reach for smaller-volume laboratories due to space requirements and infrastructure constraints.
With the DxA 5000 Fit, mid-sized laboratories can enjoy the same benefits as larger-volume departments:
- Comprehensive workflow automation to reduce up to 80% of manual steps through pre-analytical, analytical and post-analytical automation, conserving precious human resources to do higher-value clinical work
- Intelligent routing with dynamically calculated route planning for rapid and consistent TAT, with STATs always prioritised to deliver results faster
- Flexible design that can be adapted to meet a mid-volume laboratory’s space and infrastructure constraints.
“When we look at automation for our laboratories, it's a balancing act between system throughput capacity, test menu and footprint of the system. At the Harrogate District Hospital site, we knew that a large automated system will be too large and excessive and a standalone system doesn't give us the streamlined workflow we want. What we needed was a compact automation system that reduced the number of steps, requiring minimum human intervention and generated a valid result at first pass so that our laboratory professionals are not moving samples around but performing the valuable scientific tasks they are trained for," said Afruj Ruf, managing director at Integrated Pathology Solutions LLP, Airedale NHS Foundation Trust. "From its compact footprint and minimising manual work by 80%, to intelligent routing that makes sure our acute patients get their results faster than routine ones, the DxA 5000 Fit was just the right fit for us."
Dr Peter Soltani (senior vice president & general manager, haematology, urinalysis & workflow information technology solutions at Beckman Coulter) said: “At Beckman Coulter, we believe that medium-size laboratories should be able to leverage the benefits of automation to address their challenges. Just because your laboratory is not processing a higher number of samples, it doesn’t mean you have to sacrifice the benefits of intelligent laboratory automation and settle for a marginally automated workcell-plus solution. “This is why we have launched DxA 5000 Fit, the first compact workflow automation solution that’s the right fit for mid-volume laboratories because automation should be for all laboratories.”
Learn more about Beckman Coulter’s family of automation solutions and the DxA 5000 Fit on the company’s website.