At the American Association for Clinical Chemistry's Clinical Lab Expo in Chicago, Abbott announced the launch of a new diagnostic instrument - the Architect c4000 clinical chemistry analyzer which performs diagnostic tests that monitor general health including a patient's levels of sodium, potassium, chloride and organ function.

The new Architect c4000seamlessly integrates with Abbott's i1000SR immunoassay analyzer to form the Architect ci4100, an automated analyzer that completes both immunoassay and chemistry tests on one platform. With these two products, Abbott now offers chemistry, immunoassay, and integrated diagnostic testing solutions to improve the performance and efficiency of laboratories of all sizes.

Abbott is the only company offering high, medium and low-volume integrated diagnostic testing solutions that leverage the same software, reagents and sample carriers. Standardizing to a single family of instruments like Abbott's Architect products gives labs the ability to optimize processes, minimize errors, and reduce result variability, which is becoming increasingly important as clinicians rely more and more on laboratory diagnostics to guide their treatment decisions.

Abbott's family of Architect instruments generates accurate and equivalent results across instruments and labs, even at multiple sites, because these instruments share detection technologies, reagents, and software. This standardization is critical as hospitals and the Obama administration continue to emphasize the importance of capturing patient histories in electronic medical records. In a recent study of US hospitals, 73 per cent of health care decision makers and executives identified electronic medical records (EMR) as one of their top priorities for 2009.

"Standardized results across laboratory instruments is increasingly important as the reputation of the laboratory and its influence on quality healthcare depends on providing consistent, fast and accurate results to enable the medical staff on site and in other locations to make critical treatment decisions," said Michael Warmuth, senior vice president, diagnostics, Abbott. "We're pleased that Abbott can meet these and other critical needs of laboratories through our complete family of Architect products."
In addition to standardization across instruments, Abbott's Architect c4000 and ci4100 are designed to deliver improved productivity to lower volume laboratories. The c4000 analyzer can generate up to 800 test results per hour while the ci4100 integrated system can generate up to 900 test results per hour. With an extensive menu of diagnostic tests and a large sample and reagent load-up capacity, the Architect c4000 and ci4100 can consolidate a laboratory's workload to increase efficiency and save costs. Architect instruments are simple to operate with advanced sample management capabilities from the innovative three-dimensional Robotic Sample Handler. With this feature, once manual steps are now automated, which saves laboratories time and money and better meets their increased testing demands.

In addition, Abbott's integrated instruments are the only products on the market that feature no clinically significant sample-to-sample carryover, less than 0.1 parts per million, without resorting to unnecessary sample handling, plastic disposables like pipette tips or extended processing times due to the risk of contamination.

"We evaluated the Architect c4000 with one of our partner laboratories and found that the Architect c4000 provides laboratory efficiencies with commonality and equivalent results across the family," said Rob Kerekes, chemistry charge technologist at Huron-Perth Healthcare Alliance in Stratford, Ontario, Canada. "The c4000 is ideal for laboratories requiring a reliable analyzer that takes up less space."

The Architect family of analyzers includes the i1000SR and i2000SR for immunoassay testing, the c4000, c8000, and c16000 for clinical chemistry testing, and the ci4100, ci8200, and ci16200 integrated immunoassay/chemistry systems.