An interesting question I get often is “where does drug testing happen?”. I’m Joe Reilly, president of National Drug Screening. Welcome to our video blog series. The question for today is where does drug testing happen. It is often confusing for some folks because they go down to the local facility or collection site to get a drug test and sometimes they think the drug testing is done right there at that facility. But that is not the case.
These facilities are what we call drug testing centers or collection sites which are available all over the United States. At those drug testing centers, specimens are collected whether it is urine, hair, oral fluid, or a blood specimen. When the specimens are collected a custody and control form is filled out and the specimens are then picked up by a Lab courier or by FedEx and they’re shipped to a certified laboratory.
The laboratories that we primarily utilize are Quest Diagnostics, LabCorp, and Alere Toxicology and those laboratories are located in Lenexa Kansas and New Orleans Louisiana and Research Triangle Park North Carolina and a few other locations.
They’re federally or SAMHSA certified laboratories. They have the highest quality and the highest standards. So that’s where the specimens are actually tested; no individuals go into those labs to give a specimen. Those are locked down, secured facilities.
Where you can go to get the drug test is a collection site. We have over 10,000 drug test collection site facilities that are available and at our office, we schedule people every day with just a phone call and send them to one of our drug testing centers across the United States from Puerto Rico to Denver Colorado to Honolulu Hawaii.
Let me give you a little bit of the footprint of where our drug test centers are located. We work with LabCorp. They have over 1000 patient service centers or what’s called PSC’s around the country. Those patient service centers collect urine and hair specimens and send them to their SAMHSA Certified laboratory.
We also work with Quest Diagnostics. They have over 1300 patient service centers or PSCs. They collect specimens and send them to their main SAMHSA certified laboratories. Quest Diagnostics also has a network of over fifteen hundred preferred provider collection facilities that also collect urine and hair and those specimens are sent to the Quest SAMHSA certified laboratories that are located in a couple of different parts of the country. We also work with over 6000 additional Third-party collection facilities and those include all types of drug testing centers such as walkin-clinics, occupational medical clinics, doctor’s offices, etc. Basically, anybody can collect pee in a bottle or cut your hair for the drug test but we only use folks that are certified and qualified to conduct those specimen collections. We schedule those daily often with same day service meaning once we email them a pass, they can walk in immediately for the test.
You can learn more about drug testing at our website, www.NationalDrugScreening.com or call 866-843-4545 and once of our team members can assist you.
We also have some great resources and information on our blog or you can search for answer to your questions with our search tool.
