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To learn about the challenges facing both instrument manufacturers and their laboratory customers, editor Richard Park spoke with Joseph Meyer, vice president of marketing for the Centralized Diagnostics business unit of Roche Diagnostics (Indianapolis). In this interview, Meyer discusses the changes overtaking central clinical labs and how new products and technologies enable them to cope. He talks about how the job of the automation salesperson sometimes involves demonstrating the value to the wider healthcare system of automating the lab. : What have been the biggest technological advances in lab instrumentation and automation during the past few years? And what are the latest trends? The drivers for the development of both instrumentation and automation have consistently been the amount of skilled labor available to laboratories today, and the cost of that labor. The skilled clinical laboratory workforce is aging. Instruments have to be simpler in order to be operated by new, less-skilled, laboratorians. And the need for automation will continue to increase in order to reduce the amount of labor required per test for samples that come to the laboratory. A couple of technological advances come to mind. One is to bring clinical chemistry and immunochemistry testing together on the same platform so that essentially one sample can be tested for everything ordered for that sample or for that patient. That can effectively reduce the number of samples handled by 30%, plus or minus, depending on the testing split. On the automation side, there haven’t been significant recent advances, conceptually, in what automation has provided. Taking a sample in a tube and—without a technician doing anything to the sample—spinning it down, centrifuging it, and delivering a sample volume of serum to an instrument for testing—none of that has changed. The advance we’ve seen is to be able to provide that automation—that front-end