The Indiana Department of Health is partnering with Parkview Health to work to shorten the turnaround time on COVID-19 testing.
Parkview had previously relied on outside labs to process tests, which could take up to three days to see results.
Allen County Health Commissioner, Dr. Matthew Sutter, says the Department of Health will be doing the swabbing at their own sites, and turning it over to the Parkview labs.
“That’s a huge game changer for us. When we turn things around that quickly, we can quickly identify positive cases, we can contact trace them and quarantine them. The hope is that we can capture more cases and really help keep this under control until we have an effective vaccine.”
Parkview is one of several health systems partnering with the state health department to set up labs for processing COVID-19 tests. The goal is to improve testing capacity and turnaround times throughout the state.
The new machine will be capable of processing up to 1,000 tests a day, but Parkview expects to run about 400 a day.
