County Department of Health Services Laboratories Confront a Pandemic

About the Program

Category: Health (Best in Category)

Year: 2021

The SARS-CoV-2 pandemic hit an unprepared USA and Los Angeles (LA) county in February 2020. The initial challenge of being able to test the few patients who showed symptoms, quickly grew to the need for testing hundreds of inpatients and outpatients daily. LA county Department of Health (DHS) laboratories’ response to the pandemic came in the middle of an enterprise lab integration effort that had started two years previously. This integration effort was key to DHS network of labs working together quickly and successfully to handle the increasing demand for testing. By implementing several testing platforms the labs succeeded in significantly better patient care by reducing turnaround times from a high of 9 days to less than 4 hours for inpatients and 24 hours for the majority of outpatients. This was also a more economical approach with an estimated savings of over $2 million.