FROM INTERNAL BENEFIT TO
EXTERNAL BUSINESS
As a clinical reference laboratory, Children’s Colorado offers
subspecialized esoteric assays that few institutions have access
to. This means other institutions across the nation send samples
for testing, and Children’s Colorado delivers the service. As the
first hospital in Colorado to validate and offer a SARS-CoV-2 assay,
the lab expanded that model to help serve the COVID-19 testing
needs of hospitals and other clients in Colorado and neighboring
states. With five separate platforms, including two Abbott highthroughput
devices, the lab takes a diversified approach to testing
patient specimens. The strategy has allowed the team to work
through concerning supply chain challenges while still maintaining
its value proposition: a high-quality test result within 24 hours.
WASHES AS A WORKAROUND
Early on, inventory was tight for many supplies — including the
typical flocked swabs. Although the hospital now has the numbers
it needs, it did temporarily implement a swab alternative.
“With children, we often do nasopharyngeal washes, which is
where you squirt some saline into the nose and then collect it as
the specimen,” says infectious disease specialist and Children’s
Colorado Microbiology Lab medical director Samuel Dominguez,
MD, PhD. “You don’t need swabs for those because it’s a different
procedure, and you achieve the same results. It was a great
workaround for some patients.”
HIGH-THROUGHPUT MOBILE SPECIMEN
COLLECTION
The fashioning of two drive-thru collection sites, one at Anschutz
Medical Campus in the Denver metro area and the other at
Children’s Hospital Colorado, Colorado Springs, allows for safe and
efficient specimen collection that conserves the consumption of
personal protective equipment used by healthcare workers. A third
site will open soon at Children’s Hospital Colorado, North Campus
in Broomfield, along with a fourth site at Children’s Hospital
Colorado, South Campus, in Highlands Ranch. Access to these
collection sites is by appointment only, and they are not open to the
general public. Rather, they fundamentally serve pediatric patients
in the community, as well as healthcare workers.
STUDYING SERO-EPIDEMIOLOGY
The pathology lab at Children’s Colorado was the first in Colorado
to begin collecting convalescent plasma from recovered
COVID-19 patients and manufacturing it for transfusion under
FDA emergency IND protocol. Convalescent plasma contains
antibodies to SARS-CoV-2 that, when transfused into a patient
with COVID-19, are believed to help them recover by boosting
their immune system. But for reasons unknown, some recently
recovered patients don’t seroconvert — meaning they don’t
develop detectable antibodies. To avoid unnecessarily collecting
plasma from donors, the transfusion medicine team now performs
antibody testing prior to collection. •
Visit Q: Magazine online to read more about our COVID-19 research
and innovation efforts.
Left: The Children’s Colorado Blood Donor Center collects convalescent
plasma from an adult patient who recently recovered from COVID-19.
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