La Porta Anthony D, Bowden A Shalea, Barr Sharon
Core Laboratory, St. Josephs Medical Center, Towson, Maryland 21204, USA.
Lab Hematol. 2004;10(2):95-101. doi: 10.1532/LH96.04022.
Our core laboratory at St. Joseph's Medical Center (SJMC) recently installed the new Beckman Coulter LH 1500 fully automated hematology workcell. Like many laboratories in North America and other parts of the world, we are under significant pressure to improve productivity, reduce costs, and improve service provision to our hospital and clinician bases. The difficulty of meeting this challenge is often further compounded by an increasing shortage of qualified technologist personnel. We recently reported on the significant productivity gains with the introduction of the LH 750 hematology system into the core laboratory, including a 23% reduction in slide review rate, automation of reticulocyte and nucleated red blood cell counts, and an 82% increase in the pass-through rate. Evolution to the next stage of automation has come much quicker than anticipated owing to a steep rise in workload and an ever increasing shortage of trained and experienced technologists to fill vacancies in the 24-hour core laboratory operation. We chose to upgrade our LH 750 analyzers to the newly introduced LH 1500 hematology workcell in order to cope with the increased workload and shortage of available experienced hematology technologists. The LH 1500 is a compact, high throughput, fully automated hematology workcell. It is designed to automate all manual process and handling steps associated with hematology analyses, including sample sorting, loading and unloading of cassettes, automatic rerun and reflex testing, sample storage, and tracking of samples. The LH 1500 is comprised of a minimum of 2, and up to 4, LH 750 instruments (with or without integrated slidemaker/stainers). The instruments are bidirectionally interfaced and linked to a fully automated conveyor track, specimen inlet and outlet stations, a sample stockyard, and a line controller. The configuration we chose at SJMC incorporates 1 LH 750 and 1 LH 755. We report that the upgrade to the LH 1500 was a relatively straightforward process and required no redesign of the core laboratory. Based on our evaluation, we estimate cost savings with the LH 1500 of between three quarters to 1 full-time equivalent, which eliminated or decreased many manual handling steps. In addition, this increase in efficiency has freed up our technologist resources to concentrate on the more difficult and clinically important samples. This is the first published report on the new LH 1500 hematology workcell. Our research indicates that the LH 1500 is the first hematology workcell to offer hematology laboratories the next level of automation and virtually eliminate preanalytical and postanalytical sample handling and sorting. For core laboratories and high-throughput hematology laboratories that face similar pressures to ours, the LH 1500 would appear as an attractive solution to maximize hematology productivity and improve service delivery.
我们圣约瑟夫医疗中心（SJMC）的核心实验室最近安装了全新的贝克曼库尔特LH 1500全自动血液学工作站。与北美和世界其他地区的许多实验室一样，我们面临着巨大压力，需要提高生产力、降低成本并改善对我院及临床医生群体的服务。合格技术人员的日益短缺往往使应对这一挑战的难度进一步加大。我们最近报告了在核心实验室引入LH 750血液学系统后生产力的显著提升，包括玻片复查率降低23%、网织红细胞和有核红细胞计数自动化以及通过率提高82%。由于工作量急剧增加以及在24小时核心实验室运营中填补空缺的训练有素且经验丰富的技术人员日益短缺，向自动化的下一阶段发展比预期来得更快。我们选择将LH 750分析仪升级到新推出的LH 1500血液学工作站，以应对增加的工作量和经验丰富的血液学技术人员短缺的问题。LH 1500是一款紧凑、高通量的全自动血液学工作站。它旨在自动化与血液学分析相关的所有手动流程和处理步骤，包括样本分类、卡盒的装载和卸载、自动重新运行和反射检测、样本存储以及样本追踪。LH 1500至少由2台，最多4台LH 750仪器组成（有或没有集成玻片制作/染色仪）。这些仪器双向连接并与一条全自动传送带轨道、标本进出站、样本储存区和线路控制器相连。我们在SJMC选择的配置包括1台LH 750和1台LH 755。我们报告称，升级到LH 1500是一个相对简单的过程，无需对核心实验室进行重新设计。根据我们的评估，我们估计使用LH 1500可节省相当于四分之三到1个全时当量的成本，这消除或减少了许多手动处理步骤。此外，效率的提高使我们的技术人员资源得以释放，能够专注于更困难且临床上更重要的样本。这是关于新型LH 1500血液学工作站的首篇发表报告。我们的研究表明，LH 1500是首个为血液学实验室提供更高水平自动化并几乎消除分析前和分析后样本处理及分类的血液学工作站。对于面临与我们类似压力的核心实验室和高通量血液学实验室而言，LH 1500似乎是提高血液学生产力和改善服务提供水平的一个有吸引力的解决方案。
