MEMBERSHIP
the Laboratory Response Network. After
almost three years there, Davis said, “my
parents got sick.” Wanting to be closer
to their Detroit home, he applied for
the directorship of the Marion County
Public Health Laboratory, “and that
was successful.” He began his tenure in
mid-2017.
Staff
The 22-member staff includes nine
clinical technologists, most of whom
rotate among the laboratory’s three
locations, three microbiologists, three
chemists, an informatics specialist, three
managers, the laboratory director and two
laboratory support specialists who assist
with accessioning and media prep.
Revenue
The laboratory’s $2.1 million annual
budget comes mostly from county general
funds, supplemented by fee income and
federal grants.
Testing
Safety Program. Chemists test for asbestos
in bulk samples; lead in soil, dust wipes,
and paint chips; and heavy metals,
VOCs, herbicides and other inorganic
contaminants in well water, surface
water and various sources of city drinking
water. Environmental microbiologists
test food samples for pathogens of public
health concern—such as Enterobacter,
Staphylococcus, Salmonella and E. coli
0157:H7—and drinking water and pool
water samples for coliforms, E. coli and
bacterial plate counts.
Successes
In early 2019, the automated, laboratory-
wide Digi ® SmartSense temperature
monitoring system was installed. The
system runs independently of all other
laboratory networks and alerts staff to
aberrant temperature changes in any
of the facility’s incubators, water baths,
refrigerators or freezers. In addition,
the automated temperature log assists
with quality assurance monitoring and
laboratory inspections.
This year, the laboratory acquired a
new, automated platform for syphilis
testing—the AIX1000 ® from Gold Standard
Diagnostics—and the GeneXpert
platform for gonorrhea, chlamydia and
trichomonas testing.
Overall, the public health laboratory
performs about 80,000 clinical tests and
85,000 environmental analyses each year.
The highest-volume clinical service is
STD testing. A sampling of other clinical
services includes testing for HIV, blood
lead, cholesterol, pregnancy status and
hemoglobin A1c levels (for screening of
diabetes).
On the environmental side, the laboratory
supports the MCPHD Water Quality
and Hazardous Materials Management
Program, Housing and Neighborhood
Health Program, and Food and Consumer
In December 2018 the laboratory
went live with an updated laboratory
information management system
(LIMS)—the HORIZON ® LIMS. “We used a
lot of APHL resources to design our LIMS
specifications,” said David Sosbe, the
laboratory informatics lead. This two-year
project affected the entire laboratory staff,
many of whom had to “reprioritize to-do
lists” around the LIMS upgrade.
Over the course of 16 months in 2017-
2018—in the aftermath of the Flint,
Michigan, water crisis—the laboratory
performed lead testing on almost 9,000
drinking water samples from about 300
county schools. From all samples taken,
5.4% exceeded the US Environmental
Protection Agency standard at the time of
20 parts-per-billion. They were remediated
by fixture replacement or removal.
Chemist Samamtha Kumfer preps the IC instrument for anion
analysis. Photo: Marion County PHL
PublicHealthLabs
@APHL
Since 2016, the laboratory has had the
US Centers for Disease Control and
Prevention SURRG grant to test for
antibiotic-resistant gonorrhea.
APHL.org
In 2016, the laboratory implemented the
Clinical Laboratory Standards Institute’s
standards for quality management
systems.
In 2015, the laboratory implemented new
tests for soil metals analysis and boron
analysis. Said Environmental Laboratory
Manager Andrea Olson, MS, “Soil metals
analysis allows us to...offer urban garden
soil testing to the public, such as the Keep
Indiana Beautiful [initiative] and public
school garden projects.”
Challenges
The “main challenge,” said Davis, is “we’re
out of space and out of power. We need a
new laboratory building.” Although a new
public health laboratory facility has been
on the county’s long-term capital budget,
“it manages to roll over” from year to year.
In the meantime, Davis said, “In order to
add new instrumentation and new tests,
we have to remove something.”
A second challenge is dealing with the
loss of long-term staff members and the
institutional knowledge they possess.
“They will be hard to replace,” said Davis.
Goals
• Acquiring a new laboratory building.
• Instituting a respiratory disease testing
program.
• Instituting PCR testing for foodborne
pathogens.
• Instituting oil and grease analysis—a
repeated request from the county’s
water quality program to enable
identification of the source of select
surface water pollutants.
• Instituting a program for arsenic
speciation.
• Interfacing the laboratory’s new
LIMS with the Indiana Department
of Environmental Management web
portal to facilitate water quality results
reporting.
• Partnering with LabCorp—which
performs confirmatory HIV testing and
a few other tests for the public health
laboratory—to implement electronic
accessioning and electronic results
reporting. n
Winter 2020 LAB MATTERS
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