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Expert reports on the state of medical lab services in Edmonton make for grim reading.

Seventy per cent of major health decisions are based on a lab result, but Edmonton’s facilities are aging and outdated.

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It’s not just the private DynaLife headquarters, which are crowded, stuck in a downtown office tower never designed to host a state-of-the-art lab. Equipment in Edmonton’s public labs is obsolete. More than three-quarters of the lab equipment owned by Alberta Health Services is considered to be at the end of its useful life, according to a 2017 report by the Health Quality Council of Alberta.

In that same report, experts call lab services the “fastest changing area of health care.” Scientists are constantly finding more precise tests, now using gene analysis to diagnose patients more accurately and earlier, with the promise of reducing overall costs.

But Alberta’s current system for regulating lab services is so fractured and political, decisions around new tests drag on and on, physicians say. It’s “as hard or harder” to get an outdated test removed. Even a simple decision, like moving all Alberta labs to the same test requisition form, had been under discussion for three years when the 2017 report was written. Alberta is falling behind.