GREAT FALLS — Expansion is in the blood at Alluvion Health Center. The organization’s Adlera Lab recently purchased a state-of-the-art blood analyzer from Siemens Healthineers.
“Right now we can test a whole lot of stuff here at Adlera, but there are certain things like HIV, hepatitis, things of that nature where we can’t test yet,” said Adlera Lab director Cory Reeves. “We have to send that off. So with this new Atellica analyzer, that we just purchased, we’ll be able to start testing those things in house where we don’t have to ship them off to get done by a scientist.”
Reeves left a long-time career in law enforcement in July to take over as lab director. He was hopeful the new machine, known as the Atellica Solution, could be up and running right away, but with a price tag of hundreds of thousands of dollars, an investment like this needs to pass every test.
"Anytime we have a new instrument like the Atellica analyzer, it takes 30 to 45 days for validations comparables things like that,” said Reeves. “We’re about 80-percent complete at this point. We hope to go live early to mid-January.”
Providing that support are Seimens Healthineers technical application specialist Brianna Smart and zone application specialist Kathi Jacobson.
“We will be basically done with the validation studies,” said Jacobson. “So now what comes is the training of the staff of Adlera and Alluvion to run it.”
The new machine is so massive, it wouldn’t fit in Alluvion’s main lab, which is still being used to analyze blood work. That location houses the Adlera blood draw services and the lab’s Dimensions chemistry analyzer.
For now, the Atellica is being housed for now in an additional Alluvion location just down the street on First Avenue North.
Eventually, both labs will call the Rocky Mountain Building home.
“We’ll be able to combine the labs because we’re separate now if you will,” said Reeves. “We have Atellica over there, we have micro-biology and molecular over in the 601 location. We’ll all be under one roof again. So it’s a little bit of an inconvenience for us as staff for the next year and a half to two years, but that’s ok.”
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