The New Reality of Laboratory Design

Medical Lab Management: Clearly, the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic will widely affect the way workspaces are designed and assembled in the future, but what early ideas might be applied to hospitals in general, and clinical laboratories, specifically?

Sara Eastman: The COVID-19 pandemic will most certainly affect workspace design in the future and the medical profession is likely to see substantial change. Although flexible and modular design elements have been appealing to laboratory practitioners for some time now, among the effects of the pandemic has been the exposure of how space constraints and design rigidity can blunt the response to unexpected changes in workload and type. Therefore, out of necessity, clinical laboratories will need to continue to be designed with flexibility at their core and with the assumption that a massive shift in technology use and testing procedure may arise again.

In order to accommodate an unexpected and sustained spike in testing volumes for the public, larger laboratory testing centers (particularly those that handle a substantial outreach business) need to place a design focus on enabling the rapid on-boarding of instruments and analyzers into the existing workflow; this latter point is just as important as the former. When planning for the acquisition and placement of a large chemistry analyzer, consider whether another piece of the same or similar instrumentation could be added to that space (this includes power, plumbing, IT networking, etc). What this may ultimately require is for many facilities to adopt large, open, and flexible floorplan layouts with multiple access points (eg, floor, walls, and ceiling), both for current and potential technology additions and the staff members they would require to manage.