The Division of Clinical Core Laboratory Services is a diverse group of laboratories dedicated primarily to the support of the Mayo Clinic practice in Minnesota. Its activities include specimen collection, processing, analysis and reporting for approximately 7.3 million procedures annually. Eleven doctoral-level lab directors and more than 500 allied health staff work in the division.

The following groups are part of the division:

Outpatient Laboratory Services (Phlebotomy)

Outpatient Laboratory Services consists of eight locations on the Rochester campus and three outlying clinical areas that are dedicated to the collection of specimens for Mayo patients. The group provides services to outpatients from Mayo's primary and specialty care practices; pediatrics patients; nursing home patients; homebound patients; and Mayo employees.

Services include blood collection; provision of containers for urine, sputum and stool samples; a variety of point-of-care testing services; tuberculin testing; chain of custody collections; ECGs; retinal scans; and swab, sweat and breath collections. The outpatient labs perform approximately 650,000 collection-related procedures each year.

Inpatient Laboratory Services (Phlebotomy)

The Vascular Access Team supports specimen collections for patients for Mayo Clinic Hospital in Rochester, Minnesota. This group of specialized technicians is dedicated to supporting collections throughout the hospitals to include intensive care units, the emergency department, pediatric specialities, behavioral specialities and general care units.

Technicians perform insertion of intravenous catheters; venous, capillary and arterial blood collection through vascular puncture; arterial and venous blood collection from peripheral or central intravascular lines; and point-of-care testing for glucose, hemoglobin, blood gases and coagulation.

Central Processing

Central Processing receives, triages and completes pre-analytic processing for all blood and body fluid specimens from the inpatient and outpatient practice areas within the Mayo Rochester campus. Central processing laboratory staff then complete the routing of ready-to-test specimens to all DLMP laboratories within the Hilton Building as well as the Superior Drive Support Center.

Hospital Clinical Laboratory

The Hospital Clinical Laboratory has locations inside Mayo Clinic Hospital's Saint Marys and Methodist campuses in Rochester. Both locations provide STAT clinical tests and collections in approximately 15 to 45 minutes. Primary testing clients include the emergency department, intensive care units and operating rooms at Saint Marys campus and Methodist campus hospitals. Test results help clinicians provide prompt treatment to critically ill patients at both locations.

The Hospital Clinical Laboratory also provides STAT blood gas, coagulation, hematology and immunologic testing for patients in surgery at Saint Marys and Methodist campus hospitals, in addition to maintaining oversight of Mayo Clinic's Physician's Office Laboratories, point-of-care testing and the High Consequence Infectious Disease Laboratory at Saint Marys Hospital.

Central Clinical Laboratory and Clinical Specialty Laboratory

Mayo Clinic's Central Clinical Laboratory and Clinical Specialty Laboratory offers a mixture of highly automated and manual testing. The lab provides clinical testing in the areas of general chemistry, immunoassay, coagulation, hematology, renal and cardiovascular to aid in the diagnosis and treatment of Mayo Clinic and Mayo Clinic Laboratories patients.

The Central Clinical Laboratory and Clinical Specialty Laboratory performs approximately 5.5 million tests every year with a test menu that features more than 100 analytes for kidney, liver, heart, thyroid and pancreas markers, as well as assays for therapeutic drugs and drugs of abuse.

The Central Clinical Laboratory and Clinical Specialty Laboratory also performs more than 470,000 renal function and urinalysis tests each year. More than 57% of the lab's work is to provide emergency department and routine testing for Mayo Clinic and Mayo Clinic Hospital in Rochester.

The laboratory's manual testing arm performs lipid metabolism and cardiovascular risk testing as well as enzyme and nutritional assays. Lab techs employ a wide range of technologies including mass spectrometry, nuclear magnetic resonance, ELISA, Chromatography Systems (ICS), flow cytometry, visible and fluorescence spectroscopy, combustion, electrophoresis, ultracentrifugation, and automatic chemistry analyzers.

Central Clinical Laboratory and Clinical Specialty Laboratory staff actively participate in research studies related to the development of new clinical tests, the clinical utility and outcomes assessment of those tests, and appropriate test use.

Fertility Testing Laboratory

Mayo Clinic's Fertility Testing (Andrology) Laboratory offers both analytical tests and clinical services to patients within Mayo Clinic and to outside clients via Mayo Clinic Laboratories. Within the clinic, our services are requested by physicians in reproductive endocrinology, urology, family medicine and oncology.

Analytical tests for assessing the fertility status of male patients include semen analysis, post-vasectomy analysis and the assessment of individual sperm morphology using World Health Organization 5th Edition (Kruger's strict criteria) methodologies. The results of these analytical tests allow physicians to recommend the most appropriate course of fertility treatment for patients.

Clinical services offered by the Fertility Testing Laboratory include sperm preparation for intrauterine and therapeutic donor inseminations, and semen cryopreservation.

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