It’s incredibly important to monitor the impact of cases in our state, among other things,” McKinstry said on the phone call. “Please make sure that … any lab issues you’re involved with, whether hospital-based labs, point-of-care devices or a lab you contact with for services, please make sure that that reporting is happening timely to the Department of Health. McKinstry said the state anticipates there will be penalties for failure to comply with the federal regulations. In a Tuesday morning phone call with hospital officials, Molly McKinstry, a deputy secretary at the Agency for Health Care Administration, said new federal regulations will be finalized and published this week affecting laboratory reporting and nursing-home reporting of COVID-19 results. Schaffner said he hoped the state could replace Quest and their testing capacity, “because speaking as clinicians, we would like to test more rather than less.” He said the backlogged tests would lead to delayed contact tracing efforts, which could skew the overall picture of disease spread in the community. William Schaffner, a professor of infectious disease at Vanderbilt University Medical Center, said he expects Florida officials would ask Quest Diagnostics for a detailed explanation of what happened, and that other states would also be inquiring about their own results. Quest conducted at least 13 percent of Florida’s more than 6 million tests run, according to the department of health.ĭr.
Only one other laboratory appears to have run more tests - Laboratory Corporation of America, another national chain of commercial-sized labs. Quest Diagnostics has processed some of the largest volumes of coronavirus tests from Florida over the past six months. “The state uses several labs at state-supported testing sites, and we have no concerns with transitioning the few sites that utilized Quest to labs that will be able to step in and provide COVID-19 testing while meeting expectations and following Florida law,” said spokesman Jason Mahon in an email to the Tampa Bay Times. “Quest Diagnostics has provided more COVID-19 testing on behalf of the citizens of Florida than any other laboratory and we believe we are well positioned to continue to effectively aid patient care and public health response for the state,” read the company’s statement.Ī spokesman for the Florida Division of Emergency Management said Quest Diagnostics was only operating in a limited number of state-run testing sites. The New Jersey-based company said they apologized for the delay, but that it has been resolved. and in Mexico and Brazil, said they have processed and reported about 1.4 million test results for Florida and that they remain open to working with the Florida Department of Health. The commercial clinical lab company, which operates across the U.S.
In a written statement, Quest Diagnostics said the delay was because of a technical issue. Despite the backlog, all patients who were tested were notified about their results. The majority of the backlogged tests came from mid-June to mid-July, when Florida was reporting record-high cases. Do not duplicate in any form without permission.Most of the data was more than two weeks old, with some cases dating back nearly five months, according to the health department.
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