Thursday, February 25, 2021
All over the world hospitals must handle a large and growing quantity of blood samples and other small clinical samples. At the same time, they must meet requirements for minimising costs, optimising response times, minimising errors, improving services for doctors and patients, improving the utilisation of staff resources and ensuring a better working environment for staff.
More and more hospitals are taking an automated solutions approach, ensuring fast turnaround times and lean processes. For example, many laboratories have already implemented fully or partially automated laboratory systems. When it comes to transporting samples from departments to the laboratory, automating the processes that are involved offers huge potential, helping hospitals to create the necessary improvements and achieve their goals.
Sample delivery is an area in hospitals and laboratories that deals with high volumes of incoming samples from external facilities and automating the manual procedures for the sorting, registering and transporting of samples to the laboratory will deliver great benefits.
To meet the demand for automated processes in sample delivery and for the streamlining of transport of samples, Sarstedt ApS developed Tempus600® Necto and Tempus600® Solus. The systems optimise pre-analytical procedures and procedures in the laboratory and deliver a capacity of up to 1,200 samples/hour.
Sarstedt ApS supplies two unique, patented solutions – an individual loading solution and a bulk loading solution:
Tempus600® Necto is a cost-effective, automated solution for processing high volumes of samples. The samples are placed in a bulk loader where they are automatically registered and sorted using barcodes, dimensions, tube recognition or a combination of all three. The integrated sending module can send samples directly to up to six different locations – two local trays and four remote destinations. The sending module can be connected directly to bulk loaders or laboratory automation systems.
Tempus600® Necto
Tempus600® Solus is a sending station, which integrates in individually adapted automation solutions in the sample delivery area. The samples are placed individually in the inlet of the sending station using a sorting robot and the system then sends the samples one at a time directly to the laboratory.
Read on to learn about how two hospitals automated their sample delivery systems:
Skåne University Hospital, Sweden implemented a Tempus600® Necto system in the sample delivery area as part of an automation project at the laboratories.
After years and years of walking and transporting samples in elevators from the sample delivery and blood collection area situated on the ground floor, the hospital was looking at finding a more effective way of transporting blood samples in the hospital.
Necto was installed in the hospital’s sample delivery area on the ground floor, where it is used to transport incoming blood samples from general practitioners and blood samples taken from patients in the hospital departments.
The samples are loaded into the system, which sorts and sends the samples to laboratories on the 2nd and 4th storey. The sample delivery area deals with approximately 5,000 samples every day.
“The benefit of Necto is that we manage large throughput and send the samples at an even flow, so that the laboratories receive the samples at an even flow,” said Petter Hannerz, Business Developer/Strategist, University and Regional Laboratories Region Skåne, and responsible for the automation project at the laboratories at Skåne University Hospital, Malmö.
The new workflow reduces the total turnaround time of analyses performed to a maximum of two hours for routine samples and one hour for urgent samples.
Tempus600® Solus is part of the automated solution in the sample delivery area at North Zealand Hospital.
Innovative robot technology enables a North Zealand Hospital, Denmark to improve workflow and logistics in the Department of Clinical Biochemistry. A Gibosort robot automates the entire process, sorting the blood sample tubes and distributing them via a Tempus600® Solus system to the laboratories.
A large number of the samples analysed in the laboratory are incoming samples from general practitioners. The samples are packed in special boxes and transported to the hospital. Previously this work was done manually by a medical laboratory technician, who would unpack the transport boxes and prepare the tubes for the automatic analysis system. This process is now handled automatically, thus reducing the total turnaround time for test results to approximately one hour.
General practitioners order the analysis electronically and download a requisition with a barcode. When the transport box with the samples arrives at the laboratory, the robot scans the barcodes and sends the samples via the Solus sending station to the laboratory track where the analysis is automatically performed.
For more information about Tempus600® Necto and Solus, please contact Sales by e-mail at info.dk@sarstedt.com
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