This is, of course, best handled by drug reps; which I have a real love/hate relationship. I’m the clinic manager so I oversee their comings and goings - and the ones we love are good and the providers are comfortable with them, the ones we have a tricky time with are usually the ones I spend more time with.
AIT has been both. They have amazing testing. Super fast turn around. It’s PCR so it’s extremely accurate; but that of course includes picking up things you don’t care about. We do take some things off pediatric tests because of normal flora in kiddos etc.
The nice thing with there swabs is there are 3 options - a thick, a thin, and a urine. You collect your sample with the most appropriate specimen collector (thick and thin are subjective) and you do an online order. Provide the insurance. UPS it out, and log in to see your results in the morning. They’re usually in by 8am when I’m logging in to everything. And ours get picked up at 4:30 pm the night before.
Best uses so far:
Recurrent UTIs
Recurrent BV
GI bugs that are hard to identify/with non specific symptoms
Wounds
Lengthy Respiratory infections
Bacteria AND viruses with resistance for conservative antibiotic treatment - so good antibiotic stewardship.
They also run reports off your local data and update as they learn more about what clinics are seeing a lot of. (Heavy season for xyz bacterial infections, etc etc.)
They aren’t super picky about how many you do - we had a good solid couple of months while we were working out some kinks with UPS pickups where we didn’t use any. Some weeks we have 1-2, some weeks we have 10-20 swabs. They never bug us about it.
Pretty slick and easy. REALLY good with billing issues - if patients insurance won’t cover (has literally never happened with us) they give massive assistance and no patient pays over……I think it’s $150? And potentially nothing if they are on Medicaid.
Their ordering system is clunky so we are doing a bridge with AC. This should help us populate the 2,000 bits of demo info they want. Even still; ordering is easy and rapid, it could just be better.
There is a patient portal too, if they’d like to see their own results.
We like it. Helped us find a lot of mycoplasma and ureaplasm in short order, properly treat UTI’s and know which respiratory things to treat and which to “wait and see”. Wound cultures too have been really nice.
