Laboratory automation: efficiency and turnaround times

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Although automation is widely used in clinical chemistry, hematology and immunology laboratories, the microbiolo-gy laboratory has been slow to adopt automation. Somemay criticise microbiologists as being overly conservative and this may seem justified when we recognise that many of the fundamental technologies used in today’s laboratories have existed for more than 100 years (e.g. petri dishes of culture media, biochemical tests for organism identification,micro-scope for observing organisms on glass slides). Some testing in microbiology has been automated, most notably blood cultures, biochemical identification and antibiotic suscep-tibility testing, butmore comprehensive laboratory automa-tion has been challenged by the variety of specimens submitted for microbiology evaluation, complexity of pro-tocols for processing the specimens, and the technical skills