Laboratory News

State of the Art in Laboratory Automation & Robotics Seen at Japan Lab Symposium

Compared to laboratories in the United States, labs in Japan, Korea, and other Asian countries show an intense interest in applying full automation to every possible aspect of work flow in the pre-analytical, analytical, and post-analytical stages.  That is one obvious difference in the Asian approach to laboratory operations, versus the approach of North American and European laboratories.

That was evident last Friday and Saturday, April 18-19, at the 6^th Cherry Blossom Symposium & International Conference of Clinical Laboratory Automation and Robotics , conducted in Kobe, Japan. Your Dark Daily Editor was there to speak to the conference and participate in all the events, including laboratory and industry site visits. A crowd of around 300 people heard more than 24 presentations and viewed poster sessions and an exhibition hall of automation products.

As many laboratory directors and pathologists know, Japan is where the world's first automation projects were implemented in clinical laboratories during the 1980s. Many breakthroughs and technological improvements in total laboratory automation (TLA) originated in this country.  A surprising number of the automated instruments and analyzers commonly used in American and European laboratories have been developed by Japanese companies and licensed to the leading in vitro diagnostics (IVD) companies.  One familiar example is Hitachi's chemistry analyzers, which were first sold in the United States in the 1980s by Boehringer Mannheim Group.

Three key points emerged at the Cherry Blossom Symposium that will be useful to Dark Daily subscribers and readers.

First, in Japan, academic centers and tertiary care hospitals tend to be very large, ranging from 1,000 beds to 3,000 beds. Anchored next to these hospitals are large outpatient clinics, often serving several thousand patients each day. Compared to hospital labs in the United States, hospital laboratories in Japan collect specimens from several thousand patients daily and must process a significantly greater volume through their laboratories. This provides Japanese laboratories with both the motive and the economies of scale to pursue the benefits of automating laboratory work flow.

Second, it is widely-accepted that well-managed laboratories achieve the highest quality performance in the analytical stage. A far greater number of errors occur in pre-analytical and, to a lesser degree, in post-analytical. Thus, once Japanese laboratories had extensively automated their analytical work flow, squeezing down errors to a minor number, it was natural for them to look upstream (pre-analytical) and downstream (post-analytical) for opportunities to utilized automation to further drive out errors and reduce variability in the handling of laboratory specimens. Seen from this perspective, the automated phlebotomy systems in use at many Japanese hospital systems are a natural progression in the ongoing effort to use automation to improve quality, reduce errors, and produce highly-accurate lab test results.
 
Third, where hospital laboratories in the United States may outrun their counterparts in Japan is in the use of Lean, Six Sigma, and other quality management methods to improve clinical accuracy, reduce errors, and improve the quality of laboratory testing services. At the Cherry Blossom Symposium, few presenters included performance data in a Lean/Six Sigma format into their presentations, nor did they discuss automation projects in the context of a Lean/Six Sigma management philosophy.

In the coming days, more laboratory and industry site visits lie ahead before we journey back to the United States. It has been a productive an educational trip to Japan. For laboratory directors and pathologists interested in attending the next (7^th) Cherry Blossom Symposium & International Conference of Clinical Laboratory Automation and Robotics, it will take place in Yokohama, Japan in April 2010.

Respectfully yours,


Robert L. Michel
Editor
Rmichel@darkdaily.com
 

PS: Dark Daily would like to extend sincere thanks to those who went out of their way to arrange site visits and help Dark Daily better understand laboratory services in Japan. At the top of the list is Sysmex Corporation , J.E.O.L. Corporation, A&T Corporation . Special thanks and appreciation are extended to Symposium Chairman Tetsuro Sugiura, M.D., Ph.D, and his colleagues from Kochi Medical School  who organized and produced the 6^th Cherry Blossom Symposium.