Laboratory Profile - High Testing Volume

Quick Summary

Laboratory Overview

In December, 2004, Clarient Inc. first opened the doors of their new, fully licensed state-of-the-art advanced cancer laboratory, Clarient Diagnostic Services.  Their main goal has been to serve pathologists, oncologists and the pharmaceutical industry with a single comprehensive and expert source for any and all cancer testing needs and services. From the very beginning, Clarient has been focused on being a key player in a very competitive marketplace.  They have achieved this goal by creating and maintaining a competitive edge.  Their philosophy is to provide a comprehensive set of results to allow their clients to participate in the entire laboratory process. They put this philosophy in practice by introducing their PATHSiTE™ Flow Program. This unique program uses FCS Express to implement the first true “virtual flow cytometry” and allows their clients to remotely interact and make adjustments to their own leukemia and lymphoma cases.

Dr. Steve Chen, Director of Hematopathology

Lab Concerns

Several of the founding members on the Clarient team, had already tasted success from their experiences with another successful reference laboratory, US Labs.  They envisioned a lab with the same kind of potential and worked to implement a foundation that would help them to achieve this goal as well as be able to grow as the business grew.  Clarient purchased several of Beckman Coulter’s FC500 instruments with CXP software for their Flow Cytometry testing.  Although the instrument performed well, they immediately found the accompanying CXP software to be a limiting factor in the lab.  The software was slow and time consuming for patient analysis and could not provide the high quality reports that Clarient was looking for.  They were hoping to provide a better way to do “tech only flow” and couldn't’t see how they would be able to implement this type of functionality in the future.  They also wanted to be able to implement as much automation as possible and provide a way to achieve a paperless environment to help reduce errors and maximize efficiency.  They wanted to raise the bar on expected turn-around-time for their client’s leukemia panels without sacrificing high quality results.  They decided to look at other available analysis software packages to help them achieve these goals and quickly selected FCS Express.

Benefits of FCS Express

The lab set out to build a comprehensive and impressive layout for their basic leukemia panel and was immediately impressed with FCS Express.  They found the program’s focus on making the normally labor intensive process of analysis and report generation to be a much better fit for their ambitious goals.  They were able to incorporate tokens to automatically classify complicated subjective results such as grading CD Marker staining intensities. This not only made them more efficient but also provided the necessary standardization to a lab with many different techs performing analysis on multiple shifts during the day. 

They were able to fully integrate FCS Express with their LIS system from eTeleNext™ providing a completely paperless environment for patient reporting.  Patient demographics are obtained directly from LIS and placed in the report, eliminating any clerical errors. System alerts are built into the layouts to alert techs to any possible sample mismatches.  As the technologists move the appropriate gates and adjust quadrants and markers for analysis, all the appropriate statistics and classifications are automatically extracted from the data files and updated in report summary tables.  The results are then sent to clients based upon client preferences which can include the ability for pathologists to interact from their own hospitals with the analysis and make any edits or adjustments as they see fit to better interpret their patient cases. 

Clarient’s focus on providing “Tech only” or “Virtual Flow” is based upon their desire to provide this type of service to hospitals that may not have the ability or resources to acquire their own cytometry instrumentation, but which nevertheless, have a desire and the expertise to be able to provide patient results in which they played a real part in interpreting.   FCS Express is able to allow this functionality through a process called Publishing.  Pathologists can download a free FCS Express reader which allows them to re-analyze the data provided by Clarient’s Pathsite Service. 

AP Senior Director, Claudia Bunting, equates the time savings provided by using FCS Express with money savings for the laboratory.  The lab is now able to reach their critical turn-around-time goals, which means providing same-day results for their clients.  Fed Ex brings the samples in around 8:30am and the results are out by 5-6 pm that day.  She also attributes them choosing FCS Express as one of the contributing factors for helping them to retain their flow techs in a very competitive neighborhood since several other reference labs are located nearby.  “Bringing FCS Express into the lab showed our staff that lab administration here cared enough to do something; we cared enough to spend the money to help make their lives easier.”  When asked if she would recommend FCS Express to other Cytometry facilities, Claudia immediately answers “Of course!” and then adds with a smile, “Well, maybe not to our competition.”  Without FCS Express, Clarient would certainly lose a huge component of their competitive edge.