General News
April Maroschak is the Corporate Director of Laboratory Services, overseeing all labs at Cape Fear Valley Health hospitals. She said the renovated 3,952-square-foot lab space will feature a new automated line, which will allow for her team to fill needed position openings, expand testing volumes and reduce the turnaround times for lab tests.
“With one open lab space and the new lab automation, we are going to be able to test more on site instead of sending out,” said Maroschak, “The automated line will help the lab techs deliver faster and more consistent testing turnaround times. It will reduce the number of manual touches and allow for a single point of entry for samples to process through the lab.”
One area where faster lab results will make a noticeable difference will help dialysis patients.
“As a health system, we are going to help dialysis patients get to chairs sooner because they no longer have to stay an additional three days to wait for test results to come back. This is a significant change for our patients,” said Maroschak, who added dialysis patients are just one example.
According to Maroschak, the new automated line will receive the samples into the lab, automatically extracting the needed sections and performing the testing ordered. The line will also cap tubes, track storage of the specimens and discard the samples at the end of the three-day storage period. This will relieve staff from needing to manually process specimens, going to the refrigerator to pull the tubes and manually place the samples on the instruments, saving vital time for patients waiting on lab results.
“In our current state, the core lab receives over 9,000 specimens per day for the entire lab, including the microbiology and blood bank,” she said. “The automated line will process 1,400 sample tubes per hour for chemistry and hematology. This leaves us great opportunity for expansion of testing volumes.”
While the new lab equipment is cause for celebration, the impetus for the renovations wasn’t anything to cheer about. A national and state-wide shortage of qualified clinical lab technicians is pushing the move to more automation.
“The applicant pool with two- and four-year degrees in clinical laboratory science is shrinking across the nation, so we were unable to fill the openings we had. Then COVID compounded it all,” said Maroschak.
But there’s other good news coming that might help change that. Maroschak, along with Vice President of Pharmacy and the Cancer Centers Chris Tart, who was then Vice President of Professional Services, worked with Fayetteville Technical Community College (FTCC) to get a program started for an associate degree in clinical laboratory science. The next closest college offering the two-year degree was at Sandhills Community College in Pinehurst.
“At the time, we had around ten job openings [in the lab], so working with FTCC was us going out to problem solve the situation ourselves. We had to figure out a way to get more students who were likely to stay in Fayetteville,” said Maroschak.
Maroschak said the first graduating class at FTCC will graduate in July and half of those graduates have already been hired at Cape Fear Valley to fill open positions.
Staffing the lab with homegrown clinical lab technicians was real feat. Combined with the lessened workload thanks to the automated line, these two things will free up the team to concentrate on quality control.
“Eliminating the manual touches allows the lab technical staff to focus more on tasks and issues they trained for in school, like reviewing cells under the microscope, calibration and correlation of equipment and training students on theory,” said Maroschak.
Maroschak said the next goal after chemistry and infectious disease testing is introduced in August will be to add hematology systems to the automated line. Other systems will be gradually added in the future, as well.
“This is a huge benefit to Cape Fear Valley as well as other hospitals and clinics in our health system,” said Maroschak, “As the core lab increases the workload without increasing the number of staff needed, the other hospitals will be able to focus on immediate testing needs of inpatients and emergency room patients. The routine testing will shift to the core lab.”
The strategic plan for the lab is to continue to grow testing volumes for health system clinics and keep patient testing within the health system. The renovated lab, opening in August, allows for the Cape Fear Valley Health to do more with less, achieving both further efficiency and cost savings with the lab automation while maximizing essential clinical lab technician staff to do what they do best – help save lives.
