The lab automation use case

Your techs accession specimens. They shouldn't also type them.

A typical reference lab receives 1,200–3,000 faxed and scanned requisitions per day. More than half are handwritten. A quarter are missing at least one billable field. And a routine shift spends its first three hours re-keying — not running tests.

We build systems that read every requisition the moment it lands, reconcile it against the patient record, route it to the correct bench, and hand off a claim-ready billing packet. Before the tech picks up the specimen, it's already accessioned.

Lab automation pipelineavg. 1:48 end-to-end
01
Fax / scan arrivesAny fax vendor, any scanner, any EMR message
0:00
02
OCR extracts 12+ fieldsPatient, MRN, NPI, tests, ICD-10, insurance
0:07
03
EMR reconciliationCross-checked against Epic / Cerner / athena
0:11
04
Eligibility verifiedReal-time 270/271 against the payer
0:18
05
Bench-routed & accessionedHL7 ORM^O01 to the correct LIS queue
1:48
The shift before · the shift after

What changes the first Monday after go-live.

Before

  • Accessioners spend the first 3 hours of every shift re-keying paperwork
  • Handwritten requisitions average 4.2 minutes to process, with 1.3% mis-accession rate
  • Missing insurance and NPI fields caught at billing — not at intake
  • Specimen backlogs grow when fax volume spikes above 800/day
  • Each acquisition adds a new EMR instance and a new intake queue
  • Compliance audits take 2–3 weeks to prepare

With ML Health AI

  • Requisitions accession themselves the moment they arrive — staff review only exceptions
  • Handwritten extraction at 97.6% field-level accuracy, 0.08% mis-accession rate
  • Missing fields, terminated coverage, and bad NPIs flagged at intake
  • Surge capacity is automatic — pipeline scales with volume, not headcount
  • One workspace normalizes intake across every EMR in your system
  • Audit trail is continuously export-ready; compliance reviews drop to hours
Measured outcomes

What we aim for in the first 90 days.

Target outcomes we design every lab automation engagement around. Actual numbers depend on your starting point, payer mix, and document volume.

−81%
Time to accession4.2 min → 0.8 min per req
99.4%
Field-level OCR accuracyon handwritten requisitions
−94%
Mis-accessioning incidents1.3% → 0.08% of specimens
+$2.1M
Annualized billing recoveryfrom upfront field capture
Built for your benches

Every specimen class, every routing rule.

Lab automation means different things at different benches. We build for the difference.

Core chemistry

High-volume routine

CBC, CMP, lipid panels, HbA1c. Routed by shift capacity and courier window; auto-batched for analyzer throughput.

Molecular

Complex PCR & NGS

Sequencing panels, oncology assays, infectious disease PCR. Pre-auth-heavy — packets bundled and submitted before accessioning.

Anatomic path

Histology & cytology

Slide requisitions reconciled against specimen containers. Case priority (STAT, routine, research) routed by bench queue depth.

Microbiology

Cultures & susceptibility

Culture requisitions with source-site mapping, organism-specific ordering, and antibiotic susceptibility pre-selection.

Toxicology

Confirmation testing

Chain-of-custody documentation captured at intake; confirmation orders routed to mass-spec bench with full audit provenance.

Reference & send-out

Esoteric assays

Send-out testing routed by reference-lab contract, turnaround time, and in-network payer status.

We stopped hiring accessioners. For the first time in nine years, our daily volume grew and our intake headcount didn't.
See it on your documents

Ship a lab-automation pilot in under two weeks.

Send 500 sample requisitions. We'll extract, verify, and route them through a sandbox against your EMR and LIS — so you see the numbers before you sign anything.