At the beginning of the twentieth century, humans didn’t know about blood types or vitamins. Jump ahead in time and someone turning sixty this year was born before a measles vaccine existed. Someone turning forty-five was born before anti-viral drugs existed.
This week, Intermountain Health introduced us to a place where you can best see the ongoing revolution of scientific precision in medicine.
When Dr. Sterling Bennett tells people who are not in the medical field that he is a pathologist they think he does autopsies.
“I tell them our central laboratory runs more than 15-million tests a year, and we do about 60-thousand PAP tests, we look at about 200-thousand tissue specimens, and we do about 20 autopsies.”
Bennett is Senior Medical Director of Pathology and laboratory medicine for Intermountain Health.
He said, “The thing that drew me and continues to draw me to pathology is its breadth. It really covers virtually every area of medicine. But it’s a really nice mix of technology, science, mathematics, and medicine, and for me it was just a perfect fit.”
Intermountain’s Central Laboratory just got a lot bigger.
“Our central lab expanded recently from 40-thousands square feet to over 90-thousand square feet,” said Bennett.
We all know what made the need for additional capacity clear.
Bennett explained, “Our needs became acutely evident during the COVID pandemic when we were running up to 10-thousand tests per day just for COVID that we hadn’t been doing a few months earlier.
Medical science creates the ability to learn more from a lab test. But just as important to us as patients, is the ability to do all of those tests quickly.
“The thing that has surprised me the most is the degree of automation that’s come into our area,” said Bennett.
The new system borrows from bank drive-thrus and grocery store scanners, along with the logistics of tracking package at the post office or Amazon.
“And once the specimen is loaded onto that system, it gets routed to one of a number of different analyzers, or sometimes to multiple analyzers, without anybody having to touch it,” said Bennett.
All those analyzers give your doctor a crucial check on their initial impression.
“So they’re thinking along some lines even in the selection of the test, but they often get surprised…and without the laboratory he providers would have no choice but to go down this road…when the patient really needed them to be thinking in this way,” said Bennett.
And the patient’s sample doesn’t go into the dumpster. It is refrigerated, and your doctor can order new tests at any point. The Robots will retrieve the sample and do the tests, and pathologists like Dr. Bennett can focus on the cases that require their expertise.
