The prospect of cutting testing and consumable costs, and the ease of operating
discrete analyzers, has prompted many laboratories to switch from their continuous flow systems.
Additionally, as the Government moves to reduce reimbursement for panels and continues to insist on medical necessity for all lab tests, a comprehensive
discrete analyzer with rapid throughput is becoming essential.
In the laboratory, service contracts on just the
discrete analyzer, profiler, and cell counter would have totaled $26,000 in 1984.
Introduction of the benchtop
discrete analyzer enabled us to perform not only those tests but any of 16 other on patients prior to their doctor's appointment.
With a much higher degree of independence between tests,
discrete analyzers have a weaker connection between the QC specimens and patients.
For nearly two decades now,
discrete analyzers have played a major role in the evolution and automation of clinical laboratory analysis.
It is also a relatively new addition to the vocabulary of the clinical chemist, having been imported from the lexicon of the genomics, proteomics, and drug discovery scientists, but it is not a new concept for the clinical chemist who has been exposed to the use of so-called multichannel analyzers for many years, first continuous flow and then
discrete analyzers. Some historians of automation might look back to the centrifugal analyzer as the first challenge to multichannel analysis, but there is now at least one example of this technology that provides a profile of analytes on a single sample (1).