Pittsburgh’s Allegheny Health Network (AHN) recently began manufacturing COVID-19 test kits as a way to combat the national shortage.
COVID-19 specimen kits come fully assembled from the vendor, but shortages of swabs, transport media, and other components have made these kits difficult to obtain. The kits include a naso-pharyngeal swab, a tube containing viral transport media, two biohazard bags, labels, and an instruction sheet.
Highmark Health, AHN’s parent company, and AHN worked for more than a week to source or create individual test kit components.
Approximately 15 AHN employees volunteered to assemble specimen collection kits. The needed naso-pharyngeal swabs came from AHN’s existing stock of influenza test kits while the AHN Research Institute is manufacturing the transport media inside the sample tubes, and Highmark Health’s in-house print shop printed labels and instruction sheets.
The volunteers began Thursday and assembled approximately 6,000 kits. Tens of thousands more are expected to be manufactured over the next few weeks.
The volunteers, which include clinical staff, back-office employees, and senior leaders, are working at Highmark Health’s Downtown Pittsburgh headquarters. Work stations were positioned at least 10 feet apart.
AHN has enough vendor-supplied kits to meet existing patient needs and will continue to procure fully-assembled COVID-19 kits from external vendors.