Total laboratory automation (TLA) is a valuable component of microbiology laboratories and a growing number of publications suggest the potential impact of automation in terms of analysis standardization, streaking quality, and the turnaround time (TAT). The aim of this project was to perform a detailed investigation of the impact of TLA on the workflow of commonly treated specimens such as urine. This is a retrospective observational study comparing two time periods (pre TLA versus post TLA) for urine specimen culture processing. A total of 35,864 urine specimens were plated during the pre-TLA period and 47,283 were plated during the post-TLA period. The median time from streaking to identification decreased from 22.3 h pre TLA to 21.4 h post TLA (p < 0.001), and the median time from streaking to final validation of the report decreased from 24.3 h pre TLA to 23 h post TLA (p < 0.001). Further analysis revealed that the observed differences in TAT were mainly driven by the contaminated and positive samples. Our findings demonstrate that TLA has the potential to decrease turnaround times of samples in a laboratory. Nevertheless, changes in laboratory workflow (such as extended opening hours for plate reading and antibiotic susceptibility testing or decreased incubation times) might further maximize the efficiency of TLA and optimize TATs.
Keywords: laboratory automation; time to results; total automation; turnaround time; urine cultures.