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When your specimen arrives in it's designated area, it is received electronically into the department and the testing process begins. Testing departments are highly automated in every area possible to provide you with the most accurate and efficient reporting of results. Testing Departments operate 24/7, 365 days a year so there is no downtime.
South Bend Medical Foundation was the first laboratory in the United States to install Roche's Clinical Laboratory Automated System in 1997. In 2008, SBMF upgraded our testing equipment to Roche's new Automated System, the Modular Pre-Analytics 7 PLUS System (MPA). Automated lines in the Chemistry and Hematology Departments continually run specimens and are manned by Medical Laboratory Technicians and Medical Technologists. Our Cerner system will auto-verify testing that meets normal parameters. These parameters have been meticulously put into place to provide a result to you as soon as it is verified. Checks are in place to prevent abnormal or critical values from being verified. All of these specimens are checked, repeated, and if acceptable are verified manually. Rules have also been created to perform Delta Checks on all samples that have a previous result. This means if a result run today doesn't correlate with the sample we ran on your patient yesterday, that sample is pulled and investigated immediately, regardless if the value is normal.
Pending reports are continually generated in the testing departments to ensure no specimen is neglected and problems can be identified immediately. SBMF also staffs a department of biomedical engineers that are trained in the maintenance and repair of all instrumentation in our laboratory. These engineers are highly trained and available 24/7, 365 days a year as well. When there is an instrument malfunction there is no need to wait for an outside vendor to arrive, we have the ability to do it ourselves! In addition to this service, there are multiple back-up systems in all testing areas to eliminate virtually any delay in testing during an instrument's downtime.
Once testing is completed, the sample is maintained in a sophisticated storage system that preserves the integrity of the specimen, holding up to 40,000 archived samples. Samples are all tracked from start to finish and then mapped in our storage system for ease of retrieval if necessary for follow up or if additional testing is ordered.
