The Benefits a Medical Laboratory Technician May See from Automated Urinalysis
Urinalysis can be quite time consuming for medical laboratory technicians. Although some labs have begun automating urinalysis, many medical laboratory technicians are still doing confirmatory tests and microscopy by hand. Those medical laboratory technologists know how much time doing urinalysis by hand can take and how it can swamp a whole laboratory.
Many laboratories don’t have enough resources to have one medial laboratory technician on staff solely for doing urinalysis. As a result, medical laboratory technicians doing other things would be forced to put those tasks on hold to finish the urinalyses.
Automating urinalysis allows a laboratory to keep on the same number of medical laboratory technicians while being able to perform even more urinalysis. Urinalysis technology can be pricey, but medical laboratory technicians are seeing that the technology has gotten much better and cheaper in recent years. Automated urinalysis is also better quality than manual urinalysis done by medical laboratory technicians. Not because medical laboratory technicians don’t do a great job, but because the urinalysis machines are able to take 500 photos of each specimen, compared to the 10-15 that medical laboratory technicians are able to take when manually doing the urinalysis. Another benefit to automation is that results can actually be reported without the involvement of a medical laboratory technician. This can be done if a medical laboratory technician enters a few parameters into the machine before the specimen in analyzed.
The benefits seem clear to automating urinalysis. Once the hurdle of the high cost of a machine can be cleared, a medical laboratory technician should see the lab they work for prosper as a result of automation.
Find a job as a medical laboratory technician.
Atwell, Jim (January 28, 2008) Knocking Down Inefficiency With Automated Urinalysis. Advance for Medical Laboratory Professionals, page 33-35.
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