New Technology Cuts Toxicology Result Wait Times for Beaufort County Coroners.
Currently, in South Carolina, most county coroner’s offices outsource their toxicology analysis to the Medical University of South Carolina. It can take several weeks to get through the large quantities of requests, delaying local services from communicating with grieving family, friends and local law enforcement.
Charleston Country Coroner’s Office home to South Carolina’s only other Randox MultiSTAT also were using the same outsourced facilities to gather results before installing an Evidence MultiSTAT last year, becoming the first coroner in the state to use the machine. They have been using the results the machine gathers to track geographical trends in drug use, teaming up with other agencies to act more proactively than ever before.
“It lets us see trends fast,” said Bobbi Jo O’Neal, who has served as coroner in Charleston County since 2020. “We’re seeing stress in certain neighbourhoods and can notify law enforcement or the Department of Mental Health … or our Opioid Task Force, and then they hit that neighbourhood pretty hard with Narcan and education.”
Now, following their example, the Beaufort County team, headed by Coroner David Ott, are responsible for investigating all suspicious, violent, sudden, and unexpected deaths, can have results back within 30 minutes by using the Randox Evidence MultiSTAT after receiving a grant from Lowcountry Healthcare Coalition to procure new equipment for their offices. Helping staff get answers to family members quicker while allowing local officials to improve their responses to the ongoing opioid epidemic. The installation within Beaufort County will greatly reduce the need for the coroner’s office to rely on external facilities for autopsies and toxicology testing.
“The Medical University of South Carolina does a great job, but they are servicing lots of other outlying counties,” O’Neal said. “So the delay for services has gotten pretty extensive if you were to put Beaufort and Charleston back into the mix.”
Beaufort County Coroner’s Office also recently received accreditation from the International Association of Coroners and Medical Examiners (IACME), awarded to coroner’s offices whose policies and practices meet a rigorous set of industry standards. The newly awarded accreditation not only ensures standardised and up-to-date practices within the office’s staff but, will also boost their chances of receiving state or federal grants in the future.
The Randox Evidence MultiSTAT, a fully automated analyser, can perform toxicology analysis on blood, urine, or oral fluid samples in less than half an hour. Providing on-site simultaneous detection of up to 29 classical, prescription, and synthetic drugs from a single sample delivering immediate drug testing results and real-time data to pathologists, coroners, law enforcement, and medical providers. Grants can be used to assist in the purchase of the Evidence MultiSTAT, bringing testing in-house with results in half an hour instead of the current average wait time of several weeks.
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https://www.islandpacket.com/news/local/crime/article283252608.html
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