Transition of Chemistry and Immunoassay Platforms from Beckman to Roche

Due to the discontinuation of our current vendor’s service contract and technical support, the UW Medicine Chemistry Laboratories will gradually transition from Beckman Coulter chemistry and immunoassay analyzers to Roche Diagnostics beginning on January 12th, 2026. The new Roche systems are designed to improve efficiency, reduce manual workload via automation, and minimize instrument downtime and delays.

Estimated Implementation Timeline

Clinical and Operational Impact

Orders in Epic will remain unchanged. However, results obtained from the new Roche platform may not directly correlate or trend with those from the current Beckman method.

Patients undergoing serial monitoring will require re-baselining after the transition. Some analytes with minimal platform-related bias will retain their existing test codes, and results from both platforms will trend together. We categorized major chemistry tests into groups to outline the expected impact on reporting. The following table summarizes which tests will keep the same test codes with new reference ranges (and be trendable), and which tests will transition to a new test code with new reference ranges or units (and not be trendable).

Please visit the Roche Transition page to view the details of the differences between results from the Roche and Beckman instrument platforms. Groups of tests within each of the categories below can be viewed using corresponding buttons at the top of the page.

For questions, please contact the Laboratory Medicine Resident On-Call through the UW Montlake paging operator (206-598-6190).