Automating Urine Culture Plate Reading to Create a More Efficient Workflow

Streamline Your Urine Culture Workflows

Chronic staffing shortages along with increased workloads have led many microbiology laboratories to consider automation. While this seems like a practical approach, there are many important factors to consider before making such a decision, including cost, space, accuracy, ease of use, and compatibility with already established Lean workflows.

Learn about one laboratory’s experience with automation using an automated plate reading system that enabled more efficient urine culture evaluation and reporting.

Incorporating a system that reads and interprets microbial cultures using proprietary algorithms for enumeration and classification of growth can help:

• Provide rapid and accurate results, remove negative cultures from the workflow, and expedite the diagnostic process
• Save labor by significantly reducing reading and reporting times for negative cultures to allow staff to focus on more complex tasks

Learning Objectives

This webinar will help you:

• Describe how AI-based automation lab technologies can be used in the microbiology lab
• Identify how automation can accurately determine the difference between significant and non-significant growth in urine cultures
• Discover that standalone automation can be quickly and easily installed and integrated into the workflows of clinical laboratories

Watch on Demand       Download Slides (PDF, 1.6MB)

Fisher Healthcare is approved as a provider of continuing education programs in the clinical laboratory sciences by the ASCLS P.A.C.E.™ Program. One P.A.C.E.™ credit-hour will be provided for this complimentary basic level program.

Mary George, PhD, D(ABMM)

Dr. George has over 40 years of clinical microbiology laboratory experience as both a medical laboratory scientist and laboratory director. Currently, she is director of the microbiology laboratory at Albany Medical Center in Albany, New York. She obtained her PhD in medical microbiology from Wake Forest University School of Medicine and completed postdoctoral training in medical and public health laboratory microbiology at the University of North Carolina Medical Center. Dr. George applies her lab expertise to lead process improvement initiatives that create workflow efficiencies and improve test results turnaround times. In her busy tertiary-care, hospital-based laboratory, automation has improved testing throughput and helped reduce the burden of increased workload and staffing shortages.