Transcripts of the Attorney General's Initiative on DNA Laboratory Backlogs (AGID-LAB) Working Group
Tuesday, October 22, 2002
DEVELOPING A RESOURCE GUIDE
MR. SCHMITT: Let's move now to the second numbered paragraph on this topic area. We touched on this a little bit yesterday, the idea of developing a resource guide or best practices for including automation in a forensic DNA laboratory. The draft recommendation for your discussion again merely as a stepping off point to the debate or discussion here this morning is that the FRN could convene a working group along with ASCLD-LAB or others to create a document that provides this kind of information to state and local labs, best practices for integration and coordinated IT infrastructure.
MS. NARVESON: I would suggest that in order to get the widest participation perhaps ASCLD-LAB being a partner with ASCLD, being two separate organizations with a wide audience, and a certain portion of the ASCLD members are also accredited laboratories and therefore become members of ASCLD-LAB.
MR. SCHMITT: So the collaboration should be with ASCLD.
MS. NARVESON: That would get you the widest scope. That's not to say that ASCLD-LAB isn't also a worthy partner in this whole thing, but that would get the entire range.
MR. SIGEL: I guess from the ASCLD-LAB perspective just to emphasize, too, the accreditation program through ASCLD-LAB is for the total laboratory operation, management and operations, and is a requirement that a laboratory pursue all areas of their laboratory when becoming accredited.
The terminology that we kind of discussed yesterday on this best practices versus baseline standards is something we need to keep a very close look at. Our program continues to and I think always will struggle with that when we use volunteer inspectors, and the best practices frequently raises it to a higher level than a baseline for accreditation.
Clearly as we have new technology and automation, this validation process is one of the ones that could definitely benefit accredited labs as well as those that are not yet at that point because you have people that are very experienced in the field that have a challenge embracing the new technology, the automation, whether that is as good as having the individual looking at every step of the way.
So clearly ASCLD-LAB would embrace having some type of a participation in that process, but it's looking at what the practitioners that are doing that work will set up and would meet these minimum expectations. Clearly the DNA program for a number of years now has had far more structured guidance as it interlinks with the ASCLD-LAB program.
MR. SCHMITT: On the subject of automation, is it really the case that we can't say what the minimum standards are because you don't have to automate that much when you have a lot of people to do a lot of this sort of thing, that for something like this you would find most beneficial a document that we didn't call best practices, but that we called innovative practices or cutting edge practices, the idea that on certain areas we would have a document that's minimum standards; this is the least you need to do to be competent, but you also I think and the community would want to know about things that are new and interesting that's happening. The fact that you can get a great system from the folks in South Africa for a million bucks, you would want to know that. It's not a minimum practice. It's not necessarily a best practice. It's a great practice perhaps, but you would want to know about it. Are we really talking here two different kinds of documents or information collections coming out of NIJ or the FRN?
MR. COFFMAN: I guess I would like to see maybe a resource guide rather than something called best practices or standards and say here is what you could - let's say your system uses liquid blood in your offender program. Here are some automated solutions that have been developed and here are the states and the people you can call to see how that would integrate in your system. If you use oral swabs on FTA, here is another resource on people using it, here are oral swabs on cotton, and then maybe list states that are delving into doing automation on casework and how they started and what they've accomplished. I think that's what we need to know so states can call them and find out how it's working in particular labs, maybe go do a site visit, which is what we did before we switched to any automation we ever did.
I think that's what you're talking about because one system is not going to be the silver bullet for the whole country because people do things differently in different jurisdictions. So I think a resource guide.
MS. HART: Would it make sense as we're talking about kind of cutting edge practices and things that are evolving that this be something that's more of an Internet-based document so it can rapidly be changed as new things come up as opposed to having a hard bound document that's going to rapidly get out of date? Would that be more useful to people in general?
MR. SCHMITT: Does anybody have strong feelings that it ought not be limited to an Internet document?
MR. BUTLER: I just was going to say that to develop a Web-based resource because technologies are so dynamic and changing, it would be nice to have a list of here are the following companies that supply these resources, this is what it cost, these are the experiences, like Dave Coffman mentioned, for different ways to process samples, and if you have all of that in one place or at least links to things - if somebody can't get on a web page, they shouldn't be trying to set up a robot.
MS. NARVESON: I think it would also be helpful based on some discussions we had last night to know exactly how many people it takes on the front end and how many people it takes at the back end to feed these automated systems. So we may want to have some kind of instructions that if you have a staff of six forensic examiners that do your screening and you have a staff of six forensic DNA examiners, what kind of automation would best suit your needs? Certainly the system that South Africa has is very impressive. Look at the number of samples that they can push through that system. How many people do you need to have on the front end screening evidence in order to feed the system and then insure that we don't have a bottleneck at the back end when all of that data comes rolling off the instruments? So I think some directives or guidance on exactly how to size the automated system for your own operation.
MR. COFFMAN: I also think that if you do design this as a Web-based document, it needs to be very clear that what is automation solutions for convicted offender labs and what are automation solutions for forensics because with the tours that we've had through our lab, I can say it until I'm blue in the face that this is convicted offender, and every time these lab directors go back and tell their people Florida is doing automation on casework, and it needs to be very clear. Even if some automation overlaps the two, make a copy and put it in both, but it does need to be made clear automation solutions, what they're currently being used for, rather than having people assume it can be easily manipulated for casework.
MS. HART: Would the idea be that people would want a list of vendors who are out there? Sometimes what has been helpful is - let's suppose one particular lab tried one particular item and found that it was wanting in certain ways. You would want to share that information with other people before they go and invest in it, too. Would the idea behind this be that you could also kind of share evaluation information with people, and are there upsides and downsides to doing that?
MR. COFFMAN: Last year at the CODIS meeting I gave one of their breakout workshops. I gave a workshop on the automated systems that we had evaluated and why we made the decision we did and said this is the Rolls Royce if you have this sort of throughput. Here is an economic system. I think that kind of thing needs to be evaluated like, for instance, the T Can robot is a pretty high-end robot. It has a lot of high-end functionality. If you're only getting a few thousand samples a year in an offender lab, you don't really need that when you can go with a more scaled down model that's a lot cheaper.
So that kind of cost, what kind of throughput you're talking about with the system so people can shop for what they need in their state or their facility.
MR. SCHMITT: Any other points to be made on that?
MR. SELAVKA: I wasn't sure if we wanted to expand the scope just a bit to add evidence control to this same recommendation. We kind of had it as a toss-in yesterday when we talked about evidence control a little bit, but this would be a place where the same resource guide could be used to help laboratories understand the availability of turnkey, quote, unquote, software and hardware for evidence control as well as DNA.
So there isn't a centralized resource for that. ASCLD-LAB routinely reviews laboratories' infrastructure for evidence control, and case management systems would be a logical connection maybe. Also should we include the National Association of Medical Examiners? That's sort of a question for Steve. Where is your own feeling on how useful that would be?
MR. SIGEL: That's something that I guess would depend upon their desire to be participatory in that. Personally I'm not aware of that where they're really looking at the DNA-type operation.
MR. SELAVKA: It just seems like collection of evidence from bodies is a place that sorely lacks for harmony across the country and across the world. Maybe we could use this as a way of bringing our arms around them as well and having them come with us. Do it with them instead of to them. That's probably a little more out there than evidence control and case management.
MS. HART: I think there is a longer discussion here, and at this point given my recommendation has to deal with DNA backlogs, I'm going to try and limit it to that, but I think that the issues that you're raising here, and especially we touched on yesterday about some of the unidentified dead issues, is something that we have a lot of interest in. So it may be that's the next meeting or the next working group we need to kind of focus on.
