Results in less than one hour: Windsor hospital purchasing new COVID-19 testing machine

Windsor Regional Hospital has received government approval to buy a $200,000 machine that will deliver COVID-19 test results in less than an hour.

"It's a big achievement for us to have the testing available locally for the in-patients and eventually for the community," said Dr. Akram El-Keilani, chief of laboratory medicine at Windsor Regional Hospital.

The machine is called the GeneXpert. The Ministry of Health and Ontario Health has agreed to pay for operating costs, include testing cartridges which cost 70 dollars a piece.

The machine will cut wait times for results, which currently can take two to three days, to about 52 minutes. Because of the limited supply of cartridges, the hospital will only be using the machine to test in-patients at first.

It will help the hospital cut down on the use of personal protective equipment — which the hospital goes through a lot of while waiting for test results because they treat every patient as though they had the virus.

"Once we have the test available for our in-patients, and we're able to get the results within an hour, that will improve that and gets rid of all these issues," said El-Keilani.

The hospital expects to receive the machine next month but. at first, will only be able to run 200 tests per week due to the short supply of cartridges.

"Once we have the machine and we start testing, we're still gonna be sending samples outside, but with time, the production will increase," said El-Keilani, adding he predicts that will happen near the end of 2020 or early 2021.

"By that time, the machine can run up to 384 tests per day. That will be enough to cover all of our in-patients and extended to cover some of the patients from outside as well."

Having the rapid tests available will go a long way to relieving anxiety in the community, according to El-Keilani,

"Definitely will be helpful for our staff, our patients and our community as well."