How to Achieve Optimal Lab Efficiency: Tactics and Solutions

Laboratories face constant demands to do more with less, which is why achieving and maintaining lab efficiency is more important than ever. To fine-tune lab performance, leaders should review every aspect of the lab, from equipment and processes to workspace and personnel. In this article we talk about the steps you can take to enhance lab efficiency—namely optimizing your current resources and going digital—and provide an overview of the solutions that will get you there.

Check Your Equipment, People, and Workspace

Before implementing new solutions, you should start with what you have. Optimizing the resources already in your lab, such as your equipment, people, and workspace, is a good first step and one that is easier to manage.

Invest in Quality Equipment—and Ensure it’s Maintained

Newer, higher-quality equipment can be a major capital expense. But the investment can make a real difference for lab efficiency. High-quality, well-maintained equipment can return higher-quality results, run higher volumes, and reduce time wasted due to technical problems.

Older lab equipment may run more slowly and break down more often. This not only takes it offline for future testing but can cause problems for the test that was underway when the equipment failed. The failure may even waste the sample, possibly requiring recollection, increasing the time and resources needed for the test.

Equipment maintenance is crucial for enhancing lab efficiency. Following all manufacturer recommendations for cleaning, calibrating, and caring for your equipment will help keep it working accurately and efficiently—and may even extend its life. Regular maintenance can also help identify minor problems before they become bigger issues.

Focus on People

People are the heartbeat of a lab. Their skills, knowledge, and adherence to processes can make a lab function like a well-oiled machine. Efficient labs often have effective human resource departments, which are tasked with finding, retaining, and supporting qualified personnel.

Internal communication is also vital. Everyone should understand their roles and responsibilities, as well as the lab’s workflow processes. Formalized processes ensure that tasks are completed in the same way, no matter who is performing them, leading to greater efficiency and consistency within the lab.

Organize the Workspace

Clutter and chaos are a recipe for inefficiency but can be remedied. Careful organization starts with the floorplan—place equipment and workspaces in areas that complement each other and enable an efficient workflow. Be sure to give large equipment enough room for easy operation. Then, organize tools, supplies, and smaller equipment so they are easy to access. Label everything to make it easy to find. Finally, reduce the use of paper as much as possible to clear away the clutter.

Every laboratorian knows that details matter. This holds true for fine-tuning the laboratory itself. The details matter and can make a big impact on a lab’s effectiveness. Whether it’s people management or equipment and digitation, fixing inefficiencies can help the whole operation rise to the growing demands that it faces.

Go Digital and Automate

There’s nothing more aggravating than seeing your workspace covered in mountain of papers and files every day. That’s why more and more labs are going digital. Digitizing can positively impact workflow by removing clutter and, more importantly, making it easier to find and share information, store notes in an indexed format, and collaborate with colleagues inside and outside the lab.

Automation likely offers the biggest bang for the buck when it comes to lab efficiency. The demand for laboratory services is increasing at a rate that outpaces the number of trained laboratory scientists and technicians. Automation technology can help bridge this gap by streamlining data entry, specimen preparation, results reporting, and other pre-analytic and post-analytic tasks. That’s why investing in automation can free laboratorians to focus their valuable time on higher-priority and more specialized tasks.

Your Tools for Optimal Lab Efficiency

The next step after deciding to go digital is deciding which tools to implement in your lab. bioMérieux offers a wide variety of solutions that are designed with one goal in mind: to make the lab’s life easier. Our solutions perform a multitude of functions to fit any need, are presented as user-friendly interfaces, and simplify hours of work into a mere click of a button. Below is an overview these solutions.

bioMérieux CLARION™

Antimicrobial stewardship (AMS) programs set the gold standard for patient care, but the work that goes into AMS efforts can be grueling. Antibiograms, or profiles that summarize the susceptibility of pathogens to certain antibiotics, are a crucial component when it comes to AMS, but creating just one can take months of work, which is too much to ask of understaffed or overworked labs.

With the integration of CLARION, labs can offload the tedious task of data collection and automate the creation of stewardship reports. At the click of a button, laboratorians can create highly specific antibiograms that give clinicians the information they need to guide patient therapy away from unnecessary antimicrobials.

Moreover, CLARION can help improve culture contamination reporting. By automating the process, the solution can more accurately determine contamination rates, thereby eliminating potential antibiogram inaccuracies.

bioMérieux MAESTRIA™

As diagnostic solutions go the route of automation and digitalization, clinical microbiology laboratories need to handle more and more medical data. Without specific software solutions, managing the growing needs for workflow optimization, biological expertise, and data management will become increasingly difficult.

MAESTRIA is a microbiology middleware that’s designed to manage multiple instruments and laboratory information systems through a unified interface. The right information is easily accessible and flows quickly and securely to those who need it.

bioMérieux EPISEQ^®

Healthcare-associated infections (HAIs) are a constant concern in healthcare facilities, especially in the post-pandemic era. Pinpointing the source of an HAI quickly can help avoid unnecessary costs for hospitals and labs and protect both patient and provider.

EPISEQ puts the power of next-generation sequencing into your hands. This software tool automatically imports and processes sequence data for the most common HAI-related organisms, providing accurate determinations of bacterial strain relatedness. When infection prevention and control recognizes a possible HAI outbreak, EPISEQ enables the lab to provide actionable answers fast, helping track, contain, and prevent the spread of infection.

BIOFIRE^® Syndromic Trends (TREND)

Understanding epidemiological trends can help not only inform patient therapy but also improve lab workflows. BIOFIRE TREND is a software that provides local and regional pathogen circulation trends on demand. You can view pathogen trends for your lab as well as regional and national pathogen trends, all of which are created from de-identified data that have been aggregated with other participating institutions’ test data.

BIOFIRE^® FIREWORKS™

Decentralized data management hinders lab operations and workflows to an astonishing degree. How many hours have you spent sifting through test results, unable to find the sample you’re looking for because you didn’t know which binder or folder it was in?

FIREWORKS gives labs instant visibility of their BIOFIRE fleet, including test results, surveillance data, and instrument and staff performance analytics. The ability to access data anytime, anywhere can give you greater independence and control over lab operations.