Clinical Laboratory
Specimen collection can be requested by your provider for a variety of reasons, anything from a yearly physical to a blood draw to find out the gender of your baby. There are also a variety of specimen types that can be collected including feces, semen, saliva, urine, blood and tissue. These tests play a vital role in health promotion, diagnosis of illness and management of disease.
Typically, whatever specimen collection you are being seen for will be done within the clinic lab or at the office of the provider you are seeing. While not as frequent, there may be times when you can collect the specimen from the comfort of your own home and return the sample as instructed.
Each in-clinic or in-office specimen collection is done by a trained medical professional. Our staff is trained to ensure proper methods of specimen collection are conducted. Most routine testing is conducted in our in-house laboratory. Specialized testing is sent to a partner reference laboratory. The Iowa Clinic lab performs approximately 400,000 tests annually.