While working to increase turn-around-times for STAT tests, Florida’s first coronavirus patient arrived, requiring SMH’s clinical laboratory team to adapt its plans
Despite the COVID-19 pandemic, the clinical laboratory team at 839-bed Sarasota Memorial Hospital, part of the Sarasota Memorial Health Care System (SMH) in Sarasota, Fla., not only implemented a new automated microbiology system, it also installed a new mass spectrometry analyzer, along with new instruments to support large volumes of SARS-CoV-2 testing.
How SMH’s microbiology laboratory team accomplished this while shelter-in-place directives in Florida caused many patients to stop visiting emergency departments and physicians’ offices—and as hospitals and medical laboratory facilities restricted access to staff and essential personnel—provides useful lessons for pathologists and clinical laboratory managers.
Bad Timing for a Pandemic
“The early weeks of the pandemic hit just as we were beginning the phased installation of our COPAN WASPLab microbiology automation this summer,” said Harold Vore, MS, MT(ASCP), Director of Laboratory Services at SMH, in an exclusive interview with Dark Daily’s sister publication, The Dark Report (TDR), for an article titled, “Sarasota Hospital Lab Reduces Number of Hemolyzed Specimens: Lean Improvement Project Saves $3.5 Million.”
“Florida reported its first positive SARS-CoV-2 infection on March 2, marking the beginning of an outbreak that continues today,” he noted, adding, “This created the need to support the hospital in identifying infected patients in Sarasota County by having the microbiology lab acquire and set up more instruments. Also, the micro lab needed space for a new mass spectrometry analyzer to speed up pathogen identification this year.
In the same TDR interview, Olevia Fulkert, Microbiology Technical Supervisor at SMH said the microbiology lab had to reconfigure its layout to be prepared for the new COPAN system. “Our team had to arrange space for these new instruments, while protecting the space needed for the microbiology automation.”
Return of the ‘Snowbirds’
In August, SMH’s microbiology laboratory staff was busy validating the WASPLab instruments so the lab would be ready to process patient specimens when Florida’s snowbirds—out-of-state residents who arrive for the winter—return to Sarasota.
Vore knew several elements would be required for SMH’s microbiology automation project to succeed:
- He had to assure the microbiology lab’s staff that adding automation would not cause any loss of jobs.
- Timing of the implementation was critical, because lab test volume rises in the winter when tourists and part-time residents return.
- Lean methods would be important because lab staff was familiar with them and they would help the vendor to arrange the physical layout and workflow to optimize productivity, reduce errors, and decrease turnaround times.
- Vore needed documentation that showed automating the microbiology lab met and exceeded the return-on-investment projections he and his lab team used to persuade health system administrators of its value.
According to Vore, to date the installation has gone smoothly. “The staff in the microbiology lab has been phenomenal,” he commented. “They have continued to do what they always do, while at the same time we’re installing this large new system right in their midst.
“And they did not complain. In fact, they were eager to make progress in improving production,” he continued. “That attitude is common among our laboratory staff, because we saw the same thing happen when we automated our core lab.”
Increasing Microbiology Lab Capacity without Increasing Staff
Vore estimates automation will expand SMH’s microbiology laboratory capacity by up to 40%. “We measure that 40% in terms of the number of plates our techs can read per day with the WASPLab versus how we did it manually with our existing staff,” he explained. “We may still need to increase some staff. But even without adding staff, we thought we could move the peg further down the road in terms of throughput and improve our turnaround time too.
“We cannot make bacteria grow any faster and yet our specimen volume continues to increase,” he noted. “That makes automating microbiology the right strategy. Also, if we hadn’t automated the core lab starting in 2015, we might not have been able to handle the increased volume that we saw last year and this year’s additional surge in COVID-19 tests.”
How Lean Helped with the Implementation
Workflow in microbiology has traditionally been mostly manual. Therefore, combining Lean and automation can generate substantial benefits for a lab. “By definition, the design of the WASPLab is Lean,” Vore explained. “By that I mean the person who touches each specimen the least wins. That’s why the WASPLab is designed the way it is. Once we load a specimen in the front end, theoretically, no one needs to touch those plates until the testing is complete.”
“That’s the ideal we’re trying to reach,” he added. “At the moment, we still need to pull the plates to, as we say, ‘pick them.’ But we just introduced a way to improve that part of the process.
Adding Mass Spectrometry
“Along with the microbiology automation, we now read specimens digitally and we tell the machine to take a certain plate off so we can spot it,” Vore continued. “To speed up that process, we got some additional funding and bought a mass spec analyzer that uses MALDI-TOF to identify pathogens. Now we get the boost from the WASPLab, and we also use mass spec to cut six hours off our first read,” Vore added.
“The WASPLab and the mass spec give us higher quality incubation and better harvest of pathogens. Once we spot the plate, the mass spec can identify the pathogen in about two minutes,” he said.
“After going live with the mass spectrometry in August, we’ve made huge progress versus the normal process, where we would plate the specimen manually under a hood and then put the specimen in the incubator and pull it out to read 24 hours later,” he said.
“That whole step-by-step process to identify the pathogen could take 48 hours,” he continued. “But now we can move to a 24-hour, seven-day-a-week operation, where we can do first-in-first-out of pathogens in about 18 hours. That cuts six hours off the time to do the first plate read. Then we can spot it and get a result from the mass spec in two minutes. The impact for patient care can be tremendous.
“In a recent case, for example, we had to identify a specimen from an infant and used the mass spec to identify salmonella in two minutes,” Vore noted. “Normally that would take at least a day or more. That’s what I mean about making tremendous impact on patient care by using automation in microbiology.”
Clearly, this would be a challenging project for any medical laboratory to complete during the best of times, let alone during the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic. But through determination, the use of Lean, and a positive approach, SMH’s microbiology lab team implemented the first WASPLab in the state of Florida. And it will improve SMH’s ability to care for patients for years to come.
—Joe Burns
Related Information:
Sarasota Hospital Lab Reduces Number of Hemolyzed Specimens
Using Lean-Six Sigma to Reduce Hemolysis in the Emergency Care Center in a Collaborative Quality Improvement Project with the Hospital Laboratory
How We Reduced Hemolyzed Specimens Throughout Our Hospital and What We Do to Sustain Those Gains
