Total laboratory automation in Japan past, present and the future

The history of systematized automation in clinical laboratories in Japan st arted in 1981. Ar that time, about 12 laboratory technicians worked in a ty pical private University hospital laboratory (average size 1000 beds), wher eas in national university hospitals (typical size 600 beds), the number of technicians was as low as 18-25. In 1981, the Kochi Medical School was fou nded as a new national school, and laboratory staffing was limited by the M inistry of Education to only 19 technicians for the first 3 years. Therefor e, we started to develop a fully automated laboratory system by ourselves r ather than accepting an intolerable shortage of technicians. The system was based on conveyor and robotic technology, and we called this approach syst ematization. Ten years later, systematized automation was introduced into t he Japanese market. As a result, 72% of the national university hospitals i n Japan installed commercial systems for systematization. There is a trend now in hospitals with sufficient numbers of technicians, to introduce fully automated systems in their laboratories as well, and even small hospitals with less than 100 beds are planning to introduce such systems. However, cu rrent technology is too expensive and not sufficiently standardized to meet the needs of these market segments in Japan. We recommend that companies a gree on common shapes and sizes of racks and include more flexible robotic technology in their sample handling systems, to allow for plug and play sys tems and to make systematization affordable for every laboratory in the wor ld. (C) 1998 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.