A community hospital develops an integrated, comprehensive toxicology laboratory

A model system was developed at the author's institution for providing toxicology and therapeutic drugs monitoring services. These services were expanded with chromatography instrumentation and the Syva EMIT-st Drug Detection System. An emergency screen for various drugs in urine takes about one hour. The drugs or drug families detected are opiates, barbiturates, benzodiazepines, amphetamines, phenothiazines, cocaine metabolite, acetaminophen, and ethyl alcohol. Confirmation and quantitation of drugs in serum can be done by either higher performance liquid chromatography, gas chromatography, or radioimmunoassay. Sample preparation takes from five to 15 minutes and chromatography requires about 15 minutes in most cases. While more than 60 drugs can be quantitated using these procedures, rarely are more than one or two drugs present in patient samples.