Automation of Agar based Bacteriology has become a reality with a number of laboratories within Australia taking up the challenge. While most up takers aim at greater efficiency by feeding the specimen processing feature through centralisation this limits the provision of bacteriology services to the perimeter of the central laboratory and creates a microbiology void in feeding laboratories. It seems quite ironical that such an innovation could precipitate this outcome.

If one revisits the technology and open the traditional mindsets to more than just specimen processing then the most innovative and exciting aspects of this technology reveals itself in Plate reading via telebacteriology. This uses digitised images to read cultures. This transforms the way culture plates are managed into software driven image transfer process and thereby provides the opportunity to transmit the images. This opens a new and exciting frontier in the creation of the internet microbiology laboratory and provides the means to ‘decentralise’ this high value activity.  At Pathology West in NSW, we are adopting this approach to expand the horizons of the central laboratory to our network of microbiology laboratories via the internet and become one microbiology laboratory spaning thousands of kilometres..

Telebacteriology provides the means to generate professional development and inclusion in the feeder laboratories instead of exclusion and de-skilling them to ‘esky packers’.  The challenges rest with IT management of access and the capacity of the internet to perform the tasks in terms of bandwidth and latency. While the excitement for automation of agar processes creates greater efficiencies the innovation of telebacteriology creates new frontiers through internet bacteriology and the morphing of separate microbiology laboratories into one unified internet laboratory, spanning the perimeter of service way beyond the boundary of the central laboratory.