“Before the pandemic, there were around 800 samples a day,” says head Paul Niedetzky. To cope with this increase, the laboratory has now opened a new line for the analysis of blood samples. It was inaugurated on Tuesday. It is the only one of its kind in the private sector in Upper Austria, otherwise such laboratory lines are used in hospitals.
800 tubes per hour
The 6.5-ton system manages around 800 tubes per hour. Joachim Bogner, Austria Managing Director of manufacturer Siemens Healthineers, calls it “a piece of precision medicine”. It runs fully automatically: The samples come to the laboratory with a barcode, which the system uses to recognize which parameters the requesting doctor would like to have examined, and it carries out the order independently. A blood count for a health check takes about 30 minutes.
The line, which is only suitable for blood samples but not for corona tests or urine samples, is intended to increase the speed and quality of the analyzes and also relieve the laboratory staff. Niedetzky did not want to reveal how much he had invested in the system. But he had no other choice, otherwise he would no longer have been able to fulfill his supply contract because the laboratory had reached its capacity limits.
Source: Nachrichten
