Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, December 12, 1993 TAG: 9312120087
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: C-4 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: Associated Press
DATELINE: CHARLOTTESVILLE LENGTH: Medium
Roberta does not worry if the blood contains the AIDS virus or hepatitis B. She also works around the clock for no pay, doesn't break for meals and never takes a vacation.
She is a vision in steel - a robot used by the University of Virginia hospital to perform blood analyses for intensive care units.
The $70,000 robotic analyzers are computers with mechanical arms. They save four full-time medical technologist positions at a cost of about $160,000 annually, said John Savory, a pathologist who heads the clinical chemistry and toxicology laboratory at the hospital.
Savory said the system, in use since September 1992, already has paid for itself. He estimates it now costs about $10 to perform a test that previously cost $16. The time it takes to run the test also is greatly reduced. The blood analyzers can do in 2 to 3 minutes what used to take 20 minutes.
"It's that rapid turnaround that's extremely important in the care of these patients, patients who are in the recovery area from open heart surgery or patients in the regular surgical intensive care unit and other transplant patients," Savory said.
Savory is one of several UVa pathologists and engineers who developed the technology and built the patent-pending system.
He estimates the hospital can test about 140 blood samples a day using its two units.
"It has cut down on the workload some," said medical technologist Tammy Booth, who monitors the blood tests at the clinical lab, dubbed "Satellite Central."
"You don't have hands-on anymore. You don't have to worry about getting contaminated by the specimen," she said.
Not only are robots cost-effective, but it makes more sense to handle body fluids as little as possible because they could be contaminated and pose health risks for workers. Savory said it is also cheaper to send information down a wire to a technologist than to send tubes of blood through a complex transportation system.
"You worry about putting infected blood samples in the tube system," he said. "What happens if it gets lost and contaminates the whole thing. We recognized in the 1990s that it's a lot easier to send information down a wire than send a blood sample scurrying around the hospital."
The UVa team has sold its software to the Veterans Administration Medical Center in Salem for $20,000. The VA paid for a manual system - without the robot - for two intensive care units that just opened, Savory said.
"We're very excited with this new concept," said Dr. Amando Esquerra, chief of pathology and laboratory medicine at the Salem hospital.
"The obvious advantage is that it will cut down on the number of individuals handling the specimens to some degree," he said. "Sometimes accidents happen. A tube of blood is dropped. These are rare occurrences, but it does happen."
Savory said the system has other applications.
"If we can develop our systems to do cholesterol testing and some of the microbiology testing and do the monitoring off site, you could set up a little clinic down in Goochland and have it monitored" from the Medical College of Virginia in Richmond, he said. "That's where we really see the technology going."
Ernest Maclin, a Paramus, N.J.-based consulting engineer for laboratories, said the robotics technology is good "if labs can afford it."
"Big labs will suck this technology up," Maclin said in a telephone interview. "Midsize and smaller laboratories may not find this economically feasible. It's the issue of affordable automation."
by CNB