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The next wave of innovation in laboratory automation: systems for auto-verification, quality control and specimen quality assurance

  • A. Shane Brown and Tony Badrick EMAIL logo
Published/Copyright: October 24, 2022
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Clinical Chemistry and Laboratory Medicine (CCLM)
From the journal Clinical Chemistry and Laboratory Medicine (CCLM) Volume 61 Issue 1

Abstract

Laboratory automation in clinical laboratories has made enormous differences in patient outcomes, with a wide range of tests now available that are accurate and have a rapid turnaround. Total laboratory automation (TLA) has mechanised tube handling, sample preparation and storage in general chemistry, immunoassay, haematology, and microbiology and removed most of the tedious tasks involved in those processes. However, there are still many tasks that must be performed by humans who monitor the automation lines. We are seeing an increase in the complexity of the automated laboratory through further platform consolidation and expansion of the reach of molecular genetics into the core laboratory space. This will likely require rapid implementation of enhanced real time quality control measures and these solutions will generate a significantly greater number of failure flags. To capitalise on the benefits that an improved quality control process can deliver, it will be important to ensure that an automation process is implemented simultaneously with enhanced, real time quality control measures and auto-verification of patient samples in middleware. Therefore, it appears that the best solution may be to automate those critical decisions that still require human intervention and therefore include quality control as an integral part of total laboratory automation.

Keywords: human factors; laboratory efficiency; patient safety; total laboratory automation
Corresponding author: Tony Badrick, Royal College of Pathologists of Australasia Quality Assurance Programs, St Leonards, Sydney, NSW, Australia, E-mail:

  1. Research funding: None declared.

  2. Author contributions: All authors have accepted responsibility for the entire content of this manuscript and approved its submission.

  3. Competing interests: Authors state no conflict of interest.

  4. Informed consent: Not applicable.

  5. Ethical approval: Not applicable.

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Received: 2022-04-26
Accepted: 2022-09-26
Published Online: 2022-10-24
Published in Print: 2023-01-27

© 2022 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston

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  33. Acknowledgment
  34. Letters to the Editor
  35. About the estimation of albuminuria based on proteinuria results
  36. Response to “About the estimation of albuminuria based on proteinuria results”
  37. Reply to Abildgaard et al.: lot variation and inter-device differences contribute to poor analytical performance of the DCA vantage™ HbA1c POCT instrument in a true clinical setting
  38. Reply to letter from Mayfield et al. regarding “Lot variation and inter-device differences contribute to poor analytical performance of the DCA Vantage™ HbA1c POCT instrument in a true clinical setting”
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  43. The stability of pleural fluid pH under slushed ice and room temperature conditions
https://doi.org/10.1515/cclm-2022-0409
Keywords for this article
human factors; laboratory efficiency; patient safety; total laboratory automation

Articles in the same Issue

  1. Frontmatter
  2. Editorial
  3. A new milestone on the road to global standardization of apolipoprotein measurements
  4. Review
  5. Saliva – a new opportunity for fluid biopsy
  6. Opinion Papers
  7. Emerging technology: a definition for laboratory medicine
  8. The next wave of innovation in laboratory automation: systems for auto-verification, quality control and specimen quality assurance
  9. EFLM Paper
  10. The new, race-free, Chronic Kidney Disease Epidemiology Consortium (CKD-EPI) equation to estimate glomerular filtration rate: is it applicable in Europe? A position statement by the European Federation of Clinical Chemistry and Laboratory Medicine (EFLM)
  11. Guidelines and Recommendations
  12. Overcoming challenges regarding reference materials and regulations that influence global standardization of medical laboratory testing results
  13. General Clinical Chemistry and Laboratory Medicine
  14. Quantitative protein mass-spectrometry requires a standardized pre-analytical phase
  15. Report from the HarmoSter study: inter-laboratory comparison of LC-MS/MS measurements of corticosterone, 11-deoxycortisol and cortisone
  16. The influence of proteoforms: assessing the accuracy of total vitamin D-binding protein quantification by proteolysis and LC-MS/MS
  17. Total serum vitamin B12 (cobalamin) LC-MS/MS assay as an arbiter of clinically discordant immunoassay results
  18. The preanalytical process in the emergency department, a European survey
  19. Proenkephalin A as a marker for glomerular filtration rate in critically ill children: validation against gold standard iohexol GFR measurements
  20. Umbilical cord blood gases: probability of arterial or venous source in acidemia
  21. Reference Values and Biological Variations
  22. Pediatric reference interval verification for 17 specialized immunoassays and cancer markers on the Abbott Alinity i system in the CALIPER cohort of healthy children and adolescents
  23. Hematology and Coagulation
  24. Performance of digital morphology analyzer CellaVision DC-1
  25. Cancer Diagnostics
  26. Managing the impact of inter-method bias of prostate specific antigen assays on biopsy referral: the key to move towards precision health in prostate cancer management
  27. Cardiovascular Diseases
  28. Quantitation of cardiac troponin I in cancer patients treated with immune checkpoint inhibitors: a case-control study
  29. Infectious Diseases
  30. A novel scoring system combining Modified Early Warning Score with biomarkers of monocyte distribution width, white blood cell counts, and neutrophil-to-lymphocyte ratio to improve early sepsis prediction in older adults
  31. Technical and health governance aspects of the External Quality Assessment Scheme for the SARS-CoV-2 molecular tests: institutional experience performed in all clinical laboratories of a Regional Health Service
  32. Acknowledgment
  33. Acknowledgment
  34. Letters to the Editor
  35. About the estimation of albuminuria based on proteinuria results
  36. Response to “About the estimation of albuminuria based on proteinuria results”
  37. Reply to Abildgaard et al.: lot variation and inter-device differences contribute to poor analytical performance of the DCA vantage™ HbA1c POCT instrument in a true clinical setting
  38. Reply to letter from Mayfield et al. regarding “Lot variation and inter-device differences contribute to poor analytical performance of the DCA Vantage™ HbA1c POCT instrument in a true clinical setting”
  39. High-sensitive cardiac troponin T: are turbulences coming?
  40. Analytical performance evaluation of bioactive adrenomedullin on point-of-care platform
  41. Increased PD-L1 surface expression on peripheral blood granulocytes and monocytes after vaccination with SARS-CoV2 mRNA or vector vaccine
  42. Neopterin level can be measured by intraocular liquid biopsy
  43. The stability of pleural fluid pH under slushed ice and room temperature conditions
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