After several years of watching their European counterparts have all the fun, a handful of American microbiology laboratories are going live with systems touted as providing total automation of diagnostic bacteriology. The systems automate how specimens are barcoded, plated, and inoculated, then move the plates on a track to an incubator, photograph them at a preset incubation time, discard or keep the plates as appropriate, and offer up the digital images for interpretation by medical technologists viewing them on computer screens.

Leaders at American microbiology labs making the move to total automation say it marks a profound transition that dramatically improves turnaround times but also can be wrenching, hindered by technical and management challenges that come with adopting state-of-the-art technology.

My feature story in the May edition of CAP TODAY. Read the whole shebang.