Canberra Hospital’s new automated system reduces test turnaround times

Patient samples are transported to the lab without human intervention.

A new automated sample delivery system, Tempus600, has been introduced at Canberra Hospital to accelerate the transfer of patient samples from the emergency department to ACT Pathology.

Medical staff place the sample in a designated "hole in the wall," and the system transports it directly to laboratory analysers without human intervention.

Minister for Health Rachel Stephen-Smith said the system eliminates manual handling of samples, reducing the chances of errors and saving time on sample preparation, packing, and unpacking.

“Samples take approximately 40 seconds to travel from the emergency department to the lab in Pathology, which is a big time-saver when processing around 100,000 clinical samples each year,” Stephen-Smith said.