The Logistics of Employment Drug Testing

The Logistics of Employment Drug Testing

When an employer requests a drug test from an employee, the employee is instructed to go to a collection site. There, the employee’s urine is collected in a specially designed secure cup and sealed with a tamper- resistant tape.

The employee inspects and initials the cup, indicating that it was sealed in front of him or her.

The cup is then sent by express delivery service to a drug testing laboratory where it will be tested for several drugs.

The first step at the testing site is to split the urine into two aliquots. One aliquot is first screened for drugs using an analyzer that performs immunoassay as the initial screen. If the urine screen's positive then another aliquot of the sample is used to confirm the findings by gas chromatography - masspectroscopy (GC-MS) methodology.

All test results a relayed to an MRO where a medical physician reviews the results. If the result of the screen is negative, the MRO informs the employer that the employee is clean and has no detectable drug in the urine. However, if the test result of the immunoassay and GC-MS are positive, the MRO contacts the employee and tries to determine if there is any legitimate reason for the employee to have a positive result such as a medical treatment or prescription. If it is determined that the positive result is truly due to drug use, the MRO then informs the employer of the positive result.

Statistics show that about 5% of the urine samples tested in the U.S. turn out positive for drugs. The employer may contract the service of the various components by itself, or in most cases, it would outsource the entire process. With the improvement in the accuracy of on-site test devices (notably the lateral flow test devices), an increasing number of collection sites are running the tests themselves instead of sending the samples to the laboratory for analysis.

In this new scenario, the employee goes to the collection site where the urine is collected and tested by the collection site staff using an on-site test device. The results are known within minutes. If the results are negative, the employee is notified.

Employee Drug Testing - A Complete Guide