ANN ARBOR, Mich. – The University of Michigan has opened a new center called the Michigan Medicine Clinical Pathology facility for U-M clinics and hospitals.
The facility improves how patients and doctors get vital information from samples of patients' cells, tissues, blood, urine, saliva and DNA.
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Doctors can use the facility to diagnose or track their patients' diseases, plan their treatment and see how they're responding to care, U-M representatives said.
Each year, millions of patient samples will arrive to be tested by teams of highly trained staff using advanced equipment, then examined by U-M pathologists who can provide an expert diagnosis.
The facility was built as part of a $160 million project. The 139,000-square-foot facility makes it possible for U-M's Department of Pathology to serve the ever-growing demand for advanced clinical and anatomic pathology testing. Some of the tests U-M offers are available from few other places in the country.
The first patient sample arrived this week to be tested at the new facility. A new digital tracking system kept an eye on the sample's progress from the time it was obtained through testing, registered the pathologist's diagnosis and then shared the results with the health team that ordered the test.
Michigan Medicine patients can access their own lab test results, and doctors' notes about them, via an online portal and mobile app.
"This new clinical pathology facility will allow us to keep pace with the rapidly accelerating growth in sophisticated analysis of patient samples, improving efficiency and turnaround time while providing more than 1,100 different test options for the providers who rely on us," U-M Pathology Department Chairman Charles Parkos said. "This is the most up-to-date pathology facility in the country."
The project to create the new clinical pathology facility started more than four years ago after four vacant and connected buildings in northeast Ann Arbor originally built for pharmaceutical research. All were part of U-M's 2009 purchase of a research complex formerly owned by Pfizer Inc. Some of the buildings had just been constructed when Pfizer sold them.
Most of the 30 buildings at North Campus Research Complex now house U-M research laboratories and other operations. The new project is in the southern portion of the site and represents the first permanent use of NCRC facilities for clinical care operations.
The project sought to bring together testing operations, administrative functions and educational programs that were previously spread out among 10 separate locations across the medical campus and the city.
For each type of test pathology offers, the team created the ideal layout for sample handling, testing equipment, clinical consultation space and educational space for faculty to train the next generation of pathologists
Each type of test has its own dedicated area, with many new pieces of technology purchased for the new site. In some cases, the process that staff had to follow in their old location required them to walk hundreds of steps. With the lean-designed facility, that will be cut to dozens of steps.
Bringing many functions together in one place will improve efficiency and speed -- but also improve patient care. For instance, when a cancer patient has surgery to remove a tumor, pieces of the cancerous tissue are brought to the surgical pathology area to be preserved, finely sliced, stained and placed on microscope slides for pathologists to examine, Parkos said.
In the past, if the pathologists wanted to seek the input of other specialists, they often had to walk as far as a half mile to get another opinion. Now they can walk into the next room and ask, making for more efficient, timely and accurate care.
Another major feature of the new facility is in the microbiology area, where teams process samples from patients with suspected infectious diseases. A new 40-foot-long automated BD Kiestra system will help staff reduce the time to diagnosis by five to 10 hours -- saving critical time for patients seeking the most effective care for the infection that's causing their symptoms, and for those seeking to prevent further spread to others.
There are many other new improvements that will help find diseases and the causes of them in a quicker and more accurate manner. For instance, a new electron microscopy lab that will improve the speed for detailed examination of fine structures inside patients' kidneys.
Parkos said all of this positions Michigan Medicine well for the era of precision health, where an individual patient's care can be designed based on his or her unique characteristics down to the level of DNA variations.
The facility will also be able to offer new tests emerging from U-M research.