TriCore reaching new heights with automation
Sep. 20—Day and night, couriers go in and out of TriCore Reference Laboratories to drop off samples of blood, urine and other bodily fluids and tissue samples that need to be tested.
Most of the samples are loaded into a machine that sorts them based on the bar codes. It loads them onto trays where they are destined for a particular type of test.
Every 15 minutes or so, two small robots — named Bisco and Chito — are fired up. They go over to the machine and trays are loaded onto the robots, which then carry the samples to different parts of the lab. Bisco works on the first floor. Chito can use an elevator to bring samples to the second floor of the lab.
"We have two of them, so we could have them visit the floors and the departments a lot faster than previously," said Gwyneth Olson, TriCore's lab director. "They will actually tell us, 'Hello, I haven't gone anywhere in a while. I'm ready to go.'"
TriCore, a New Mexico medical testing laboratory, is using an increasing amount of automation to help its scientists perform tests for the three major hospital systems in Albuquerque and other medical facilities throughout the state. For example, TriCore has only had the machine that sorts the samples for two years.
"This is an area that had no automation," Olson said. "Our couriers would put everything in a bin, and we hand-sorted every single thing."
Much of the automation takes the mundane and repetitive tasks of a laboratory away from the scientists. One result has been fewer injuries from repeating the same motion, such as capping and uncapping tubes.
"It's taken a lot of the ergonomic stress away, which has been great for the lab," Olson said.
The laboratory employs 640 clinical lab assistants and approximately 430 lab scientists across the TriCore enterprise.
In addition to the main laboratory in Albuquerque, TriCore has a lab in Las Cruces, 16 hospital labs throughout the state — as well as a handful of branch labs and cancer center labs and more than 40 patient care centers.
"They are important because they are STEM (science, technology, engineering and math) jobs here in New Mexico," she said.
The Journal toured the laboratory last week and saw how Bisco can load a tray of samples and then carry it to the chemistry section of the lab. There, tubes of blood are loaded onto an elaborate track system that can efficiently move 10,000 tubes, which are sent for different tests, like hepatitis, infectious diseases, hormones and tumor markers.
"This is a really high-volume lab. We do around 350,000 tests per month," said Larry Crockett, the operations manager. "One of the challenges of clinical chemistry is we want to make sure our results only vary by patient condition, not by which instrument it was run on or which tech ran it."
On the second floor, there is a section of the lab for cytogenetics, which is the study of chromosomes.
The field has been automated in recent years.
"We do a lot of old-school techniques. When it comes to chromosome analysis, this is the biggest jump we've had in quite some time," said Timothy McBride, technical supervisor of Cytogenetics at TriCore.
Previously, the chromosomes were studied one at a time through a microscope. TriCore now has a machine that can scan the samples and then project the chromosomes onto a computer screen, which increases efficiency for the lab.
On the other side of the second floor of the lab is the infectious disease wing. A large machine called a WASP, a walk-away specimen processor, has been deployed in recent years to help sort the samples.
Olson said New Mexico having an infectious disease testing laboratory makes is quicker and more efficient to test for different diseases.
"You'd definitely lose the timeliness of results," Olson said.
Ellen Richards, a specialist in the infectious disease wing, said there were originally concerns that the WASP would take away jobs. But she said the machine is used to take care of the mundane side of the science, like sorting the slides.
"There's always that concern when we talked about bringing it in. Are we going to lose our jobs? But I think people pretty quickly realized that this is doing work that nobody really wants to do," Richards said. "We can actually be scientists, which is kind of fun."
