Fast Coronavirus Lab Results In Florida Through Statlab Mobile
ST. PETERSBURG, FL —Statlab Mobile, a Miami-based company, has partnered with Florida Department of Emergency Management to help provide fast turnaround lab results of coronavirus tests administered at vulnerable communities around the state.
A team of nurses hired by the state travel to places such as nursing homes that have residents who, according to the Florida Department of Health, are at a high-risk of contracting the coronavirus because of underlying health conditions. The Statlab bus has a team of lab technicians that follows them to each stop.
Fast lab results helps get the infected person the proper treatment they need sooner rather than later. Lab result times varies with each clinic, but some people wait five to seven days or more for their results because some testing centers send the specimen off to a lab in a different part of the country. Statlab technicians administer the lab tests after the nurses bring the specimen from inside the testing location after they've collected them throughout the day to outside in the parking lot to the bus.
"We're delivering results within 24 hours to the state," CEO Bryan Wilson told Patch, "and then the state disseminates those results to the nursing home facilities that we visited or to the patients that have arrived for drive-up testing sites."
Wilson said that they have offered their services to areas where it might take a person one to two hours to drive to the nearest testing site. They have visited agricultural sites such as sugar cane fields in Lake Okeechobee.
Statlab Mobile launched on its first partnership mission on May 7, and since then they have accompanied nurses to 30-plus cities in Florida.
"The plan is to have more than one lab going around," public relations manager Ted Miller said. "The goal is to expand and have many of these buses offer testing to many more around the state."
Statlab is a full-service clinical laboratory but right now their primary focus is coronavirus testing. As of June 24, the Florida Department of Health reported that throughout Florida's 804 nursing home and long-term care facilities there have been a total of 2,693 positive residents transferred to other healthcare facilities to receive coronavirus care treatment. The report included that there are currently 1,514 residents in these nursing home and long-term care facilities who have tested positive.
"The idea was to bring help to those that are vulnerable, those that can't otherwise get the kind of medical information they would otherwise love to have, but they've just written off because they are so used to not having this kind of access," said Wilson. "We're really happy to be working with the state and bringing this new innovation to the public."
Coronavirus testing is free through Statlab.
For more information about Statlab and their testing services, visit their website at Statlab Mobile.
This article originally appeared on the St. Pete Patch
