The rapidly spreading Covid-19 virus is currently presenting the world with unprecedented challenges. While public life continues to be restricted, researchers are working at full speed on the development of vaccines and faster testing procedures for diagnoses. Reliable and, above all, timely laboratory tests for Covid-19 are a key element in slowing down and containing the pandemic. According to the Robert Koch Institute (RKI), the demand for tests will increase rapidly in the coming months. Lean management techniques can significantly increase the efficiency of processes and equipment throughput in laboratories.
The Covid-19 virus is currently on everyone’s lips. Since the first cases of the respiratory disease became known in December 2019, the virus has now developed into a pandemic that is also restricting public life in Germany on a large scale. Researchers are currently working at full speed on a vaccine. There are currently over 40 projects researching the virus and more are being added. However, despite accelerated approval procedures, experts agree that it is very unlikely that a vaccine will be approved before 2021.
To prevent the rapid spread of the virus, it is important to provide early clarity for people with symptoms and to identify infected people quickly using tests. WHO Director-General Dr. Tedros A. Ghebreyesus describes this as follows “We cannot stop the pandemic if we do not know who is infected. Therefore the simple request to everyone: test, test, test!”. Only then can appropriate measures of home isolation or quarantine be taken in a targeted manner. In addition, the willingness of those affected to follow drastic measures is significantly higher if there is clarity about the infection and it is not a “normal flu” or even just a cold. It can then also be expected that home isolation will be adhered to more consistently and thus contribute to containment.
However, as the number of suspected cases is rising steadily and rapidly and there is talk of exponential growth, laboratory capacity can quickly become a bottleneck. In the USA, for example, it is reported that testing capacity is far too low and only a fraction of people with coronavirus are actually tested.
Tests for Covid-19 are carried out in hospitals, university clinics as well as external laboratories and medical centers. However, their capacities are limited and cannot be expanded at will. According to calculations by the Geniu Lab Institute, capacities are already at their limit. With growth rates of 10-30% per day for new infections, building up new capacity is a race against time. In addition, capacity fluctuates depending on staffing levels. The capacity can even be reduced due to the reduced availability of employees as a result of daycare and school closures as well as immediate cases of Covid-19. Sufficient equipment and materials must also be available. This is an additional risk due to production bottlenecks in the internationally networked supply chains.
Through the crisis with lean management
Consequently, in order to prevent the increasing number of cases and thus the number of samples to be tested from leading to bottlenecks in testing capacities in the short or long term, laboratories must design their procedures and processes as efficiently as possible and make optimum use of and expand equipment capacities in a targeted manner.
To achieve this, lean management techniques, which have become established over the last two decades for laboratory optimization, offer interesting starting points. The reduction of waste enables scarce personnel and equipment capacities and material resources to be used in the best possible way. Efficiency increases of up to 75% have been achieved in numerous laboratory projects – even if the majority of a test is already automated. This means that an increasing volume of work and samples can also be managed by a constant laboratory team. Lean labs are therefore also an important approach to successfully meeting the challenges of the crisis in coronavirus testing laboratories. Laboratories that prove to be a reliable partner during the crisis despite a drastic increase in demand for testing will emerge stronger from the crisis.
Sources:
- Report from ARD Extra on 19.03.2020
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