Laboratory automation: efficiency and turnaround times

Abstract

Although automation is widely used in clinical chemistry, hematology and immunology laboratories, the microbiology laboratory has been slow to adopt automation. Some may criticise microbiologists as being overly conservative and this may seem justified when we recognise that many of the fundamental technologies used in today's laboratories have existed for more than 100 years (e.g. petri dishes of culture media, biochemical tests for organism identification, microscope for observing organisms on glass slides). Some testing in microbiology has been automated, most notably blood cultures, biochemical identification and antibiotic susceptibility testing, but more comprehensive laboratory automation has been challenged by the variety of specimens submitted for microbiology evaluation, complexity of protocols for processing the specimens, and the technical skills required to evaluate and interpret cultured specimens. Despite these challenges and the apparent reluctance for many microbiologists to forsake tradition, we are at the threshold of major changes and opportunities in the microbiology laboratory with the introduction of laboratory automation. In this review I examine the existing automation platforms, how clinically significant value can be realised from the systems and the path forward for additional opportunities. For the sake of clarity, I will restrict my comments to automated platforms currently in routine clinical use and not discuss systems under development or promised.