Laboratory Supplies Required in Processing Stat Baby Specimens
Laboratory services are critical to providing patient care at the medical center. The Clinical Laboratory orders thousands of items that include very specific laboratory products such as analyzer reagents, and gloves common throughout the medical center. There is a full time employee dedicated to ordering and distributing supplies for the Automated Laboratory. Laboratory specific supplies come in two broad classes; those that are specific an analyzer and general lab supplies. The examples we will use for this summary are creating reagent for the Roche Chemistry Analyzer, and transfer pipets that are used to aliquot specimens in every hospital and research lab in the medical center.
Creatinine level is a very common analysis performed on virtually every patient sample. It must be purchased from the manufacturer of the analyzer, which makes it difficult to negotiate pricing separately from the equipment. In addition, the reagent has an expiration date, and must be refrigerated making the holding costs very expensive. There is only a nominal additional cost to order product. As a result, this item is counted and ordered weekly to bring supplies up to a par value. However, this frequency can be problematic for many reasons, which includes more stock rotation and a need to repeatedly work up lot changes on the analyzer.
In contrast, the transfer pipettes are purchased from our preferred vendor, but can be bought from any laboratory supplier. It has no expiration date or storage requirements. They are part of a large standing order the Automated Lab has with Cardinal, which is delivered twice weekly.
Our analysis of the laboratory’s order process does not match the calculated EOQ, or reorder quantity calculated. Space in the Medical Center is very limited making it difficult to keep much stock on hand.