Lab assistants in the United States make around $18 to $20 an hour. That means in a month, they earn somewhere around $3,000, and in a year, somewhere around $36,000. On average, a lab assistant, or even an ordinary lab employee in the US, can earn between $42,000 and $64,000 a year, depending on their experience, area of expertise, and so on.
When you’re hiring a new lab employee, the expense further increases. Most of it has to do with training the new recruit and getting them up-to-speed with all that’s happening at your lab and in their field at present.
Normally, you can expect to spend around $5,000 on various training programs for each recruit. However, you can limit this expenditure on training by integrating the right laboratory information software (LIS) with your laboratory’s processes and workflow management.
Having established that, in this article, we’ll look into how the right laboratory information software solution can improve efficiency and simplify employee onboarding at your lab.
Ensures User-Friendliness
Any good LIS will be user-friendly. This user-friendliness helps existing employees train new hires faster and more efficiently, as witnessed first-hand by a US-based dermatopathology practice manager who deployed the NovoPath laboratory information software at their lab and experienced the efficiency in training it provided.
The user-friendliness of the software helped reduce the employer’s stress of running the office. Now, no matter how many new employees walk through the lab’s door, the manager will sleep a lot better knowing that they have user-friendly information software that’s easy to learn with very little training necessary.
Manages Workflows
With the LIS deployed, you can manage your lab’s workflow and assign tasks to your employees as necessary. The LIS will allow you to distribute and monitor each task giving you a bird’s eye view to understand where any given case is at any point of its dedicated process.
Such oversight helps manage your new as well as old lab assistants or employees better, and it also gives you more control over who’s doing what. This approach to people and work management is especially important for newcomers as it can help them quickly adapt to the employer’s daily expectations from them.
As a result, these recruits will gradually become more efficient at what they do and can expect to grow as professionals too.
Reduces the Chances of Human Error
From handling large volumes of scientific data to sample tracking and lab report generation, your LIS can do it all. Moreover, since the software handles everything automatically, there are very low chances of you or your recruits making minor input or calculation mistakes.
Plus, with the right LIS in place, it becomes much easier to identify bottlenecks in your workflow and understand where a particular case is at any point.
Because of all these features, LIS reduces the chances of human error, which can help new recruits overcome their fear of failing or making mistakes. As that happens, they’ll have an easier time adjusting to the lab and all the work going on over there.
Offers Scalability
LIS allows you to scale up or down your lab operations as needed. In the case of hiring new employees, you can easily scale up your lab operations and use the LIS to distribute work accordingly.
The best LIS will come with pre-built and customizable dashboards, along with automatic case distribution. It will also have an automatic straining feature that can help reduce redundancy. These features work together to provide better scalability to all your new employees.
Each of your lab assistants or employees will have their own dashboard and will know what’s expected of them by the end of the day or week in terms of the work. The automatic straining feature will be particularly useful here as it will make sure that no two employees or lab assistants are working on the same test or project when only one individual is needed for the job. This helps eliminate the risk of redundancy.
Employee onboarding is always a tiring task, especially at a pathology lab. However, with the right laboratory information software in place, the overall process need not be that difficult. Once everything is set up and the LIS is running as it should, the onboarding process at any pathology or research lab becomes easier.
The Editorial Team at Healthcare Business Today is made up of skilled healthcare writers and experts, led by our managing editor, Daniel Casciato, who has over 25 years of experience in healthcare writing. Since 1998, we have produced compelling and informative content for numerous publications, establishing ourselves as a trusted resource for health and wellness information. We offer readers access to fresh health, medicine, science, and technology developments and the latest in patient news, emphasizing how these developments affect our lives.
