Improving laboratory efficiency: the hidden costs of manual slide handling

The direct costs of a glass-slide workflow are easy to see on a budget line. The indirect costs; the full-time employee (FTE) hours absorbed by retrieval, assembly, transport, and misfiling; the turnaround time (TAT) hours lost to physical logistics; the staff time spent on avoidable rework – are harder to see, yet they can have a substantial impact on laboratory efficiency, productivity, and costs.

There is a specific pressure that every laboratory manager understands from the inside but struggles to quantify from the outside. Pathology request volumes are rising, estimated at 5-10% annually, driven by ageing populations, expanding screening programmes, and the growing complexity of precision oncology workups.¹ Simultaneously, the laboratory workforce faces chronic understaffing: more histotechnologists and pathology staff are retiring than entering the field, and recruitment has become a persistent operational challenge in laboratories of every size.² The result is a gap between what the laboratory needs to produce and the human resources available to produce it. 

Most laboratory managers are managing this gap through informal means: longer shifts, deferred leave, informal cross-training, and the quiet absorption of excess workload by experienced staff who cannot sustain it indefinitely. What most have not yet done is a rigorous audit of where their current workflow is consuming time and staff capacity that a different infrastructure could recapture. The glass-slide workflow is the largest single reservoir of hidden inefficiency in the anatomic pathology laboratory, and it is largely invisible to the managers closest to it.