While the ability to scale capacity has always been important for clinical laboratories, the need to respond to potentially huge and unpredictable spikes in demand has been highlighted more than ever by the COVID-19 pandemic. With clinical labs under increasing pressure to deliver more results for a broader range of patients, it is essential to design testing strategies and workflows around the triangular goals of scalability, flexibility and consistency.

Scalability across the spectrum

One means of achieving that is by investing in instruments developed as a series for use across the capacity spectrum. This ‘family’ of instruments can enable a broad variety of tests and throughput, and uses the same reagents and consumables with virtually identical user interfaces. Think of it like an Android device: with the same underlying software, you can use a basic smartphone, a sophisticated tablet, or a high-performance laptop, all with the same interface and apps.

Diagnostic instruments designed as a family of products from a single vendor offer similar benefits. The family might include a low-throughput analyser and a high-throughput analyser, for example. There may be a few features specific to each instrument, but for the most part, they are interoperable and run on the same supplies.

Flexibility to your needs

With the family concept, the same consumables and reagents can be used across instruments, so there is no need for costly investments in instrument-specific products that may not wind up being used. It also makes it easy for labs to grow, swapping in higher-throughput instruments to replace lower-throughput models as needed without having to drastically change workflows or rethink core processes.

Another benefit is that once lab technicians are trained on one of the instruments in the family, they can easily use the related instruments without much additional training. This approach has proven quite valuable during the pandemic and its associated lab staffing shortages; staff members who have never used an instrument before can easily get up to speed to cover an absent technician if they’ve already been trained on another instrument in the family.

Consistency is the key for patients and laboratories alike

The instrument family approach can be particularly important for healthcare networks, such as a large hospital in a group with smaller hospitals, or a reference or core laboratory working with smaller labs. In these cases, the large facility might choose several high-throughput analysers to meet testing demand, while the smaller operations could adopt the low- or mid-throughput version as appropriate.

In healthcare networks, each lab wins because even the smallest facility can offer the same, consistent test menu available across the instrument family. If any instrument has to be taken offline for maintenance, testing can easily be shifted to another instrument from that family in the lab.

In addition, the entire network gets excellent economies of scale because it can buy in bulk the reagents and consumables to support all of those instruments. This is such an appealing component that in some countries, ministries or departments of health are speaking to vendors about investing in instrument families as a way to ensure high-quality results for their citizens while being as cost-effective as possible.

Most importantly, physicians and patients benefit from this model as well. They get consistent, comparable test results no matter which lab their samples are sent to or which size of instrument is used. That’s especially important for patients who have to be monitored over time, potentially in different facilities depending on whether those patients are inpatients or outpatients when testing is needed.

If you’re interested in learning more about instrument families, be sure to look for optimal scalability offerings — ideally, ranging from analysers that are appropriate for smaller laboratories, all the way up to high-throughput models for laboratories with 24/7 operations.