High-quality service and support from IVD vendors is critical to the success of any molecular and histopathology lab. Remote service models, which leverage online connectivity to monitor instrument performance and deliver proactive support, are becoming increasingly popular.

In Europe and North America, many clinical labs are embracing remote service models as a strategy to improve uptime, reduce maintenance costs and streamline operations. Yet most molecular and histopathology labs in the Asia Pacific region still struggle to connect their systems.

Australia is one of the few countries in the region where a large portion of molecular and histopathology labs have made the leap. We recently spoke with senior scientists at Monash Health Pathology in Melbourne and PathWest Laboratory Medicine in Perth, two major Australian lab groups, to better understand their experience with remote service and their hopes for the future. Here’s what we learned. 

Getting started with remote connectivity

Having started their journey to remote service more than 7 years ago, Monash Health Pathology and PathWest Laboratory Medicine were relatively early adopters of remote support technologies. In the early days, however, both faced multiple challenges with getting started.

One challenge was dealing with the concerns and demands of hospital IT departments. “Initially the hospital was reluctant to have any connections,” recalls Alex Laslowski, a Senior Scientist in the histopathology team at Monash Health Pathology. To get started, he had to deploy a workaround with a USB 3G dongle that bypassed the hospital IT system completely.

“We operated that way for a little while until the hospital became more comfortable with third-party connections and set up a dedicated channel for companies to access de-identified information from those instruments,” he says.

Dr Todd Pryce, a Senior Medical Scientist In-Charge in the Department of Clinical Microbiology at PathWest Laboratory Medicine, had a similar experience when he first tried to connect his molecular diagnostics instruments.

“There was a lot of paperwork and billing with our telecom provider, so there was a lot of scrutiny over the process and it had to be justified from a laboratory perspective,” noted Pryce. “But with the sheer size of these new instruments, having the ability for remote access wasn’t an option—it was mandatory.”

On the plus side, Pryce did not experience much red tape around data sharing: “There were the usual concerns around the possibility of patient information being cast over the air,” he adds. “But the way the systems are designed, it’s all about instrument diagnostics, and not much about gathering sensitive data.”

Experiencing the benefits

Both labs felt that instrument connectivity resulted in more proactive service and overall improvements in lab efficiencies. At PathWest Laboratory Medicine, for example, Pryce says that he periodically got phone calls over the years about components at risk of failure. He recalls one time he was notified about a failing tip adapter—a component that sometimes fails but that is relatively simple and inexpensive to fix.

“I have found the technical aspects of remote sensing to be really useful,” says Pryce. “If you look at the metadata behind instrument breakdowns, I think there’s a lot of mitigation work that can be done. You could have a hit list of things on the instrument that can fail and that can be remotely monitored.”

Working from Perth, one of the world’s most isolated cities, makes the benefits of proactive service especially compelling. Sourcing engineers or application specialists to fly in from the East Coast, where most of the main service hubs are located, can sometimes lead to delays. “If I lived in New Zealand, I’d be closer to the East Coast of Australia than I am in Perth,” he quips.  

At Monash Health Pathology, Laslowski’s lab is not quite so remote, but he once faced a similar situation when one of his instruments required immediate maintenance and his usual service technician was away on an assignment in Perth. When his vendor sent another engineer to fix the instrument, the primary technician was able to watch the system remotely and make sure that the staining completed successfully.

The future of service

Both Laslowksi and Pryce see potential for remote service to be improved even further in the coming years. They imagine a future in which instruments provide more statistical information and user-friendly apps that visualise data for operational or research purposes. They also look forward to service models that include even more proactive monitoring and maintenance of instruments.

“I’d like to see our systems automatically send alerts to field engineers when critical errors pop up, saving me from having to contact the field engineer myself,” says Laslowski. “If it has this AI built into the background and helps for a smoother running lab with less downtime, then that’s a huge benefit.”

Laslowski notes that remote service will make the job of lab managers much easier, but remembers that patients will be the ultimate beneficiaries: “Preventing instrument failure means you are going to have few instances of test failure. The result is improved patient safety and experience.”