Shands Hospital at the University of Florida is a private, not-for-profit hospital that specializes in tertiary care for critically ill patients.  Shands at UF continually receives recognition as one of the best hospitals in the nation by U.S. News and World Report because of its dedication to patient care, education and research.  It is also the primary teaching hospital for the UF College of Medicine. 

The Hematopathology Laboratory serves as a major consulting center for the various Shands Hospitals along with a number of other institutions and clinics in the Southeast.  The analysis of clinical samples is one of the main sources of data for UFs clinical research and educational activities.  Data access and networking capabilities are critical to this lab to allow for teaching and collaboration. 

The pathologists use the program routinely for clinical purposes. In addition, many residents (post-docs) use it during their rotations through the department.  FCS Express not only provides a solution to the networking requirement but also allows each doctor the flexibility to create exactly the layout needed for their cases.

Dr. Braylan describes their workflow like this: “We use several layouts. Two standard ones are utilized to analyze tissues and blood/bone marrows, respectively. These are the ones that are used for most routine cases. Other templates are used for T-cell clonality, DNA analysis and other specialized applications with smaller number of reagents. Also, each one of us has a "personal" layout (or layouts) that we prefer for certain situations. Layouts are the starting point in our analysis. In most instances, the analysis goes beyond the initial template and consists of interactive observation of the data and appropriate gating strategies applied to the specific situation using something like the "paint-a-gate" approach to recognize abnormal populations and characterized them.” 

Since FCS Express uses a familiar Power Point like interface, training the lab staff to use the program was easy. The staff made use of the ability to create and label multiple gates, inserted tokens into their layouts to extract needed statistics and keywords from the data files, edited fonts and annotations, and utilized the multiple undo function, along with the networking capabilities. They send their acquired data files onto a server so they can access data from multiple computers. They also receive better support from their IT department on the PC platform. In addition, many cases are reviewed in a group setting on a giant 42” monitor located in the lab. Because of the simplicity of FCS Express, even new residents can immediately participate and perform an analysis in front of his/her peers.

The ease of use and benefits of FCS Express has certainly saved them time in their daily work which translates into other gains for the lab.  Although saving time and labor is a major concern for most laboratories including this one, Dr. Braylan feels that using FCS Express also means a higher quality analysis which is the number one concern for this lab.