The Fürst Medical Laboratory is a privately owned routine laboratory serving approximately 6,000 physicians in southern Norway. The staff at the laboratory currently performs about 12 million tests a year, running an average of 8.5 tests on each of the 5,000 tubes that are put on the track daily. The lab’s test volume has increased by 55 percent in just four years.
The lab also used a number of analyzers from multiple manufacturers, which added to their operational pressures. “Because our analyzers were from different manufacturers, we had to carry the samples around a lot and rack and re-rack the tubes to a significant extent because the vendors all had different racks,” says Dr. Marie Buchmann, Medical Director, who has worked at Fürst Medical Laboratory for 11 years. “This meant we used close to two man-years just racking and re-racking tubes.”
Fürst Medical decided to automate its laboratory with the ADVIA® Automation Solution, enabling it to meet the challenges of an increasing and complex workload, maximize throughput, and maintain cost-effectiveness.