The Henry Ford Health System’s www.henryford.com Pathology and Laboratory Medicine are partnering with Beckman Coulter Inc. www.beckmancoulter.com to streamline operations. The plan is to fully automate the Henry Ford Hospital laboratory with new equipment at twelve Henry Ford locations. The updated equipment will improve the efficiency at the Henry Ford laboratories which produces more than 30 million diagnostic reports each year.
This year alone, Henry Ford’s Pathology and Laboratory Medicine is expected to interact directly with nearly 604,000 people in outpatient settings, in addition to six inpatient hospitals and 28 medical centers. The laboratories also provide clinical testing for patients from several other leading health systems throughout Southeastern Michigan and the Midwest.
The laboratory system operates similar to an assembly line. The automated equipment at the Henry Ford Hospital delivers bar-coded samples to appropriate stations in the lab where laboratory personnel perform clinically-needed tests.
The equipment then transports samples to a storage area for automatic retrieval if additional testing is required. This automated technology speeds up the testing process and allows the organization to give large number of patients and providers same-day results.
As Richard Zarbo M.D, Chairman of Henry Ford Health System Pathology and Laboratory Medicine, “Patients and their families want answers they can trust from tests and the diagnoses and they want the results as quickly as possible. Becoming fully automated upgrades our ability to deliver on both of these needs.”