#30 COVID Testing Labs and Electronic Lab Reporting (ELR)

The Redox Podcast

In the near term, rapid and accessible covid testing will be much more important than an actual vaccine. With ample testing, we can identify who’s infected, contact trace, and dramatically reduce the spread. At Redox, we’ve been working with a variety of labs and diagnostic companies who are actively testing patients. I wanted to learn more about how these labs work and how some of them have been stood up so quickly in the wake of the pandemic.

In August, the folks at UCSD reached out to us about a new covid testing clinical lab they were standing up. By September, we had integrated the UCSD Biochemical Genetics Excite Lab’s information system with Epic, their EHR. I invited on of the masterminds behind its creation, Dr. Louise Laurent, on the show today to share the story of how they stood up their lab so quickly and scaled it to 1000 tests per day in just a few months. Covid time flies.

We’re now working with UCSD on electronic lab reporting to share these results with the appropriate public health agencies. In the pandemic, Redox has gotten really good at ELR and it’s something that we get asked about daily. So with that in mind, I invited Meredith Haley, customer success at Redox who leads the team who works with these customers, to give us the quick rundown on the ELR space.

Dr. Louise Laurent is a Professor and vice chair for translational research at the University of California San Diego. She’s both a researcher (focused on applying genomic and epigenetic methods to optimize the clinical and preclinical utility of stem cells), as well as an OB-GYN physician caring for women with high risk pregnancies.

Beyond these responsibilities, she’s spent the past many months utilizing these skills to co-create a high throughput covid testing pipeline and the UCSD Biochemical Genetics Excite Lab that’s now serving all of the UCSD’s students and faculty as part of their Return to Learn initiative. I invited her here today to tell this story as both a bright spot in our health care system’s response to the pandemic as well as an example to other similar organizations attempting to do the same.

Highlights:

• 02:39 - How the USCD Biochemical Genetics Excite Lab got started
• 07:27 - From sample to result, the testing workflow
• 09:28 - Overview of Electronic Lab Reporting (ELR)
• 13:22 - Redox’s approach to ELR
• 18:58 - Observed vs unobserved sample collection