BATON ROUGE -- Our Lady of the Lake in Baton Rouge unveiled a new piece of technology Tuesday that will help deliver lab results for patients faster.

"The new system is the Abbott GLP Automation line. We're only the second site in the state of Louisiana to have this. It is fully electromagnetic, so it doesn't have moving parts like previous versions. It's going to handle approximately 5,000 specimens a day," OLOL Lab Division Senior Director Jim Teague said.

Teague says that the line performs the routine and repetitive tasks in order to reduce turnaround time and standardize the process.

"Tasks like receiving specimens, the centrifugation of specimens, delivering specimens to the analyzer, and storing the specimens after testing. These are tasks that are previously performed by human beings," Teague said.

WBRZ asked what the original process was like.

"We called it our sneaker network because we had medical laboratory assistants that would receive the specimens in the computer, and then manually run them in the centrifuge, and then manually place them on the analyzer. Then the clinical laboratory scientist, our degreed members of the team, which makes up about sixty percent of the lab team, would then take them off the machine and manually store them and have to go retrieve them if additional testing was ordered," Teague said.

Teague was asked what kind of specimens and tests the automation line, called the GLP systems Track, would be for.

"These are tests for your body chemistries and your organ function, your electrolytes, therapeutic drugs. This line did do the COVID antibody tests, but it does infectious disease testing for hepatitis, HIV," Teague said.

The vials, also known as samples, are loaded into a loader module. The automation basically takes care of everything else, including putting the vials onto these little car-like robots. The cars are on a track and take them down the line.

"They know when they need to charge, so they'll go to the specific charge lane to charge, and then you can see like it transfers the samples wherever it needs to go, so the cars are very smart," OLOL Chemistry Supervisor Tina Iyasere said.

The cars will take the vials down to specific sections, like the chemistry analyzer.

"There's actually a bulk loader that you can just dump tubes in, and the automation line picks them up, receives them by scanning their bar code, and sends them to the centrifuge when appropriate, and then sends it all the way down the line to the chemistry analyzer where the tests are run. Then after it's completed, it goes to a holding bay so if the provider orders additional testing, it will retrieve the specimen and run that test and put it back," Teague said.

Our Lady of the Lake says this new technology is part of their commitment to taking care of patients quickly and efficiently.

"We've been wanting this for over 10 years, so we've been working on getting it in for about six months now, and it's up and rocking and rolling for about three weeks," OLOL Lab Director Susan Gueho said.