Wait for patient safety officer to ask first question…
Lab Tech Response 1: Once the specimens arrive, I remove them from the pneumatic tube and stack all of them in the lab analyzer. The analyzer reads the barcode and performs the appropriate test as long as the specimen had been marked as “collected” by the phlebotomist. If the phlebotomist doesn’t mark it as collected in the computer then the analyzer will kick it out. The analyzer takes 35 minutes to run a CBC and 42 minutes to run a BMP. Once analyzed, a lab tech will confirm the results, look for suspicious outliers, and release the report to the electronic medical record which on average takes 4-5 minutes from the time the analyzer finishes.
Wait for patient safety officer to ask second question…
Phlebotomist Response 2: I have data on how long everything takes in our lab. Overall it takes the lab 47 minutes to result a BMP and 39 minutes to result a CBC from the time we receive the blood until the time it is reported in the medical record. We have a very low standard deviation of only +/-3 minutes, which means the delays in labs being reported on time doesn’t stem from us. We are pretty consistent and don’t have a lot we can change given the fixed time it takes the analyzer to run. Furthermore our analyzers are top tier, you can’t get much faster than these machines go!
Wait for patient safety officer to ask fourth question…
Phlebotomist Response 3: These machines can handle a lot of labs. I don’t think it would be a big deal for the instrument but we may need to adjust our staffing if that was occurring really early in the morning since we only have one tech on from midnight until 5:30 AM. If too many labs came in before 5:30 AM we might need to hire a second tech.