Bulk vs. In-house
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One of the problems with testing...
This past weekend, I've got a DON chewing on my ear, because it is taking forever to get COVID-19 results back on one of her nurses. The nurse is asymptomatic and the DON needs the body.
So I get on the horn with Q#@+$ and tell them to put a giddy-up on it. Next morning, I get a QNS report. That's labspeak for they lost the specimen. Next step is to cloud up and rain on Willis-Knighton. W-K is our initial reference lab, with bulk testing such as COVID-19 being referred out by them. But W-K also does COVID-19 testing in-house, but only for their patients and employees.
I managed to get them to agree to do a re-collect test on our nurse at W-K and results would be turned out last night.
And therein lies the problem...Shortages of testing platforms and testing personnel. The initial test sent to the big lab was 4/2. It was kicked to California, where they have some large testing platforms and many employees. The second test was done by a decent size lab, but the platform is much smaller, throughout is much less and trained personnel are solid gold. But the smaller lab will be more accesible, faster transport and better able to respond to its clients. When I called the big lab yesterday, I went through automated phone hell for 15 minutes before talking to a human. When I called the smaller lab, a human answered the phone and I was talking to the testing tech in 10 seconds.
All this rambling is to illustrate these points:
- Local is better, for testing purposes.
- Throughput is important for platforms.
- Trained people are really scarce.
- Well-functioning systems take time to build.
- Obtaining results can be a nightmare, when tracking through multiple labs and multiple LIS.
Now, how do we solve the problem?
