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Toxicology Laboratory The toxicology laboratory at Hennepin County Medical Center in Minneapolis, Minnesota, has provided clinical, emergency and forensic toxicology, alcohol testing, therapeutic drug monitoring, and medical legal services for the past 31 years. Formally established in 1970 to support the Hennepin County Medical Examiner's office the laboratory now supports 8 medical examiners or coroners offices in a five state region. In addition to the services provided to the hospital and medical examiner's office, the laboratory also provides drugs of abuse testing for city, county, and state agencies, public and private industry, several emergency departments in the Twin Cities, athletic teams, half way houses, correctional facilities and drug courts. The laboratory also provides adult and pediatric lead screening programs. The laboratory provides the following distinctive but overlapping services: therapeutic drugs monitoring, emergency drug screening, alcohol and other volatile analysis on an emergent basis, drugs of abuse screening and confirmation, and forensic testing of drugs in urine, blood and tissues. Further, vitreous humor chemistry analysis is also performed on a daily basis. The toxicology laboratory performed 365,000 tests in the year 2000. Of these total tests 10,300 were volatiles, 142,000 were semi-quantitative immunoassays for the correctional facilities, 650 GC/MS analyses, 14,000 therapeutic drug monitoring specimens. The laboratory provides a 24-hour consultative service to clinicians and other healthcare clients and provides and assists in developing testing programs for drugs of abuse including chain of custody procedures, appropriate specimen collection and interpretation of results, involving design for the most cost effective program.
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