First on-site evaluation of the cobas 8000 clinical analyser
The Poole Hospital NHS Foundation Trust has become the first site, worldwide, to evaluate the full serum work area (SWA) capabilities of the cobas 8000 high throughput clinical analyser.
The cobas 8000 SWA platform, incorporating two cobas c701 high throughput clinical chemistry modules together with a cobas e602 immunochemistry module, has been installed in the Trust’s Clinical Bio-chemistry Department, which operates at two laboratory sites and provides biochemistry services for both Poole Hospital and the nearby Royal Bournemouth Hospital.
‘Upgrading to cobas 8000 increases our capacity and provides faster throughput of samples,’ explained Darren Jose, Pathology General Manager. ‘Our current Roche platforms shaved four hours off our run times compared to our previous analysers. With cobas 8000 we are able to save even more time. The system also “future proofs” our service against further workload increases. Our plan is to have two cobas 8000 platforms at each laboratory. These powerful and space efficient platforms will easily cope with our high volume, high throughput work - and we can also run specialist assays (such as specific proteins and therapeutic drugs), user defined assays and low volume tests.’
With 183 different assays, Roche reports that it provides ‘…the largest menu of tests available on an automated serum work area platform and, with 35 different configurations, cobas 8000 provides in-built flexibility to satisfy demands – both now and into the future. This truly modular platform is the perfect solution for the consolidation of workloads in laboratories running greater than 2.5million tests per year. In addition to increasing productivity in the laboratories, cobas 8000 also fits with Poole’s vision for ‘one touch’ sample processing’.
‘Sample receipt was very labour intensive and slow,’ Darren Jose pointed out. ‘The cobas 8000 allows us to fully exploit order communications technology. Samples will come into the laboratory already barcode labelled, with the test request already in the system. Then, all we do is load the sample onto the Roche Modular Pre-analytics, and it will proceed automatically through the required analysers before being removed, stored, or even disposed of without any further manual intervention – literally one touch processing, which will save much time and effort.’
The cobas 8000 platform at Poole Hospital will also be linked to the cobas p501 storage retrieval mod-ule, further automating and speeding up the sample handling process.
Details: www.roche-diagnostics.co.uk
21.05.2010
