Survey Findings
A new survey of more than 400 laboratory professionals conducted by The Harris Poll, commissioned by Siemens Healthineers, revealed the palpable impact of laboratory staffing shortages. Read what the data reveals.
Survey Insights from Michele Zwickl
This research explores the challenges faced by medical laboratory professionals in the U.S., especially regarding staffing shortages, the perceived impact on patient care, and their expectations for how automation and AI may help address these challenges.
Declining interest in these lesser known, but incredibly important, medical fields has led to academic and training program closures and fewer graduates to keep pace with the number of retiring professionals. With around 338,000 laboratory professionals currently practicing, it’s the equivalent of one laboratory scientist per 1,000 Americans. Meanwhile, the number of tests laboratories must perform is increasing to address an aging population, growing chronic disease and consumer demand, and more tests becoming available for laboratories to perform as science evolves. Staff shortages in the lab create a greater burden for staff and also can lead to delays that affect the time it takes providers and patients to receive their test results, a bottleneck that can inhibit timely patient care decisions.
Our survey indicates their greatest challenges include limited staff to support laboratory operations (39%), increasing testing volume (37%), lack of automated sample handling (27%), and day-to-day administrative tasks (27%).
Laboratory professionals acknowledge that high- and low-risk errors may be made in the laboratory due to being overworked or burned out. Low-risk errors were categorized as administrative, documentation, or repeat-testing-related errors, while high-risk errors involved biohazard exposure or reporting incorrect test results. Nearly 1 in 4 (22%) lab professionals report personally having made a lower-risk error due to being overworked or burned out while 14% of lab professionals reveal they have made a high-risk error due to being overworked or burned out. Others worry about making mistakes because of burnout (29%).
While 52% see automation as a potential threat to their jobs, nearly all (95%) agree that adopting automated technologies will help improve patient care, and 89% believe their labs need automation to keep up with demand. Most lab professionals (91%) agree that AI tools and technology can help solve unmet patient care needs, and 90% believe adopting AI is necessary for improving patient care.
If manual tasks were reduced, lab professionals could spend more time on training, mentoring, quality control, and efficient test management—unlocking greater value for patient care. Lab professionals say they would be able to spend time on training and mentoring existing employees (46%), performing more quality control troubleshooting (42%), and more efficiently managing the test sample process across departments (39%). Advanced technologies like LLMs and AI can streamline workflows, reduce errors, and empower lab professionals to focus on high-value tasks, ultimately enhancing patient outcomes and healthcare efficiency.
Reluctance to adopt new technology is in part due to cybersecurity/IT-related challenges (43%), fear/hassle of changing the laboratory’s system(s) (43%), or lack of available budgeting/funding (43%).
Patients want to understand the accuracy of their lab results (56%), to be able to access test results and explanations online (55%), and they also want quicker turnaround times (54%). (For more detailed information about patient expectations, see the Patient Testing in America report.)
Laboratories of all sizes are affected by burnout and, therefore, so are the patients they serve.
Our product portfolio for core laboratory testing offers flexible, scalable solutions meant to support diverse laboratory testing needs. One example of how automation can help is through integrated automation available within our Atellica CI Analyzer platform. In many labs, this replaces a fragmented workflow, where staff manually load samples, decap tubes, initiate calibration and QC, and manage sealing and archiving. This can eliminate more than 25 manual tasks performed throughout the day.
The impact on daily operations is substantial. Instead of spending time at the bench loading racks, removing caps, triggering runs, and physically moving samples, technologists oversee a system that performs these actions seamlessly. Walkaway time also increases substantially, enabling labs to sustain throughput during shift changes, breaks, and overnight periods with minimal staffing.
This fundamentally changes the role of the laboratorian. The next generation of laboratory workers do not want to burn out doing repetitive, uninspiring work. With integrated automation, time is reallocated from repetitive, manual activities to higher-value responsibilities such as monitoring system performance, reviewing flagged results, and managing exceptions.
From a performance perspective, labs have reported a reduction in manual workflow steps of approximately 75% after implementing this level of integrated automation*. The result is not only improved efficiency, but a more resilient and scalable operation aligned with today’s workforce realities.
The outcomes achieved by the Siemens Healthineers customers described here were achieved in the customers’ unique settings. Since there is no typical hospital or laboratory, and many variables exist (e.g., hospital or laboratory size, case mix, level of IT adoption), there can be no guarantee that others will achieve the same results.