Global lab automation market: $10.4 billion industry in 2012

The global lab automation market is suggested to have reached a value of around $10.4 billion in 2012, and is driven by a number of key factors. Some of these factors include a reduction of government reimbursement rates for laboratory tests, and the increasingly productive and cost effective way that clinical labs are being run.

The quest for efficiency, however, is confronted with the decreasing availability of trained laboratory technologists and an expanding menu of diagnostic testing protocols. Often, increased efficiency means increasing or maintaining the timely output of test results with the same number or fewer technologists.

Labour accounts for more than 60% of the cost of producing test results. Automating a lab increases the available time for value-added steps -- the tasks that technologists perform that help make a difference in the quality of the test -- such as reviewing critical results.

When the trend toward clinical laboratory automation first began, in the early to mid 1990s, much of the talk about automation focused on automating all lab functions - total laboratory automation (TLA). Targeted to the largest, highest-volume laboratories, TLA requires a major financial commitment - several millions of dollars -- and the space for installing equipment. But TLA is not an affordable nor practical solution for the majority of small to mid-sized hospital and other diagnostic laboratories. More recently, the trend for most clinical labs, and for many automation system manufacturers, has been toward modular automation, which includes independent work cells or self-contained work stations, and automation for transport, handling, and pre- and post-analytical processes.

In the US, only about 7% of the laboratories are considered to be able to benefit from TLA. A 500 bed hospital or smaller, for instance, is not suitable for TLA, unless it has a large outpatient business. A typical mid-size to large lab in the US processes up to 3,000 tests per day. But with an aging population and the evolution of personalized medicine and molecular diagnostics, more labs are considering going total.