Revolution in genomics and microbiology: the impact of technology

Technology is often understood in a very narrow sense such as the introduction of automation to what was a manual process. When this happens, the benefits are normally obvious immediately and very often cost-effective. For example, who would want to go back to manually inspecting blood culture bottles for signs of bacterial growth? Although we should note that even applying technology to this simple process has its own pitfalls as it requires the development of sophisticated algorithms to monitor bacterial growth. These can be confused by delays in transporting blood culture bottles to the laboratory prior to incubation, which upsets the expected increases in turbidity that are expected to occur when the culture is being incubated at 37°C.

            The Health Technology Assessment (HTA) arm of the National Institute of Health Research (NIHR) takes a much broader view of the term technology. For the NIHR, technology assessment could mean not just studying the effectiveness of a particular technology such as MALDI-TOF but the assessment of a particular product, such as an antibiotic or probiotic. Here, a yoghurt containing a probiotic is a technology.

Adapting to effectiveness