By Dan Aceto

Staff Writer

 The site of a former shopping center is the new home of a highly specialized laboratory on Route 1.

NorDx laboratories settled into the former Orion Center on Route 1 on Jan. 20. The plaza will now be known as MaineHealth Professional Park and will serve different departments of the health care provider.

NorDx laboratories is a nonprofit organization that provides testing and analysis for all laboratory work from Maine Medical Center and Southern Maine Medical Center as well as other hospitals throughout the state, said president Stan Schofield.

“This is a state-of-the art laboratory second to none on the East Coast,” Schofield said.

The Orion Center was last occupied in 2004 by light industrial and manufacturing businesses. It was originally the site of the shopping center the Mammoth Mart shopping center in the 1960s. Town Assessor Paul Lesperance said the center was purchased by MaineHealth in 2008 for more than $7 million dollars. 

NorDx was established in 1976 in Portland and was the first clinical laboratory in Maine, said Marketing and Sales Director Scott Taggersell. 

Schofield said NorDx was forced to find a larger space to hold its testing and analysis to allow room for expansion of Maine Medical Center’s Cancer Institute. 

He said construction began two years ago at the Orion Center and was completed Jan. 20. The entire laboratory was moved from Campus Drive to the present location in less than 72 hours and the laboratory never shut down operations during the move, Schofield said.

“It was a very complex ballet and orchestration,” Schofield said. “There were 100,000 variables of things that could have gone wrong. I was shocked it went so well. It’s really a tribute to the people that work here and those who designed it.” 

Taggersell agreed and said moving a laboratory is no easy task.

“We had a giant matrix with a checklist of more than 1,300-plus items on it. The planning was meticulous,” he said.

Schofield said the site at the Orion Center was chosen because the area is close to other MaineHealth facilities, which NorDx is a part of, and provides easy access. 

“We had a good relationship with the town, it was very positive,” Schofield said.

Town Manager Tom Hall said he was more than happy about the re-development of the Orion Center.

“It’s wonderful to see the complex put to productive use,” Hall said. “Traveling alongside Route 1 it’s lovely to see the parking lot full with activity. They really did a very nice job of integrating the building into a very prominent location. There are lots of interesting things going on inside and it holds great promise.”

Schofield said the layout and design of the building are modeled to emphasize productivity and efficiency and eliminate waste and inefficiency.

“The whole design is kind of like a manufacturing plant,” Schofield said.

Schofield said NorDx provides specialty testing in the fields of auto-chemistry, clinical microscopy, coagulation, cytopathology, dermatopathology, endocrinology, flow cytometry, hematology, immunoassay, microbiology, molecular diagnostics and tissue pathology.

“A lot of people don’t realize the scope and breadth of what we do here,” Taggersell said. “We attract a lot of people from all over the country.”

Schofield agreed.

“We’re very fortunate to have this high level of medicine available with our population density,” he said.

Schofield said because of the high level of technology, automation and volume of work the laboratory processes, it is able to keep costs low, which keeps the price of health care down. He said the laboratory has freed up space at Maine Medical Center that can be used for other forms of patient care as well. 

Taggersell said although the laboratory is an integral part of the of the MaineHealth system, all patient care, including taking blood, is conducted at the MaineHealth site at Campus Drive on Route 1.

Schofield said the new facility is 45,000 square feet, operates 24 hours a day, seven days a week and will conduct more than 2.5 million tests annually. He said although the hours are demanding, it speaks volumes about the resiliency of workers at the laboratory.

“No matter what the storm is, we won’t close,” Schofield said. “We had 6-foot drifts against the door once and everybody still showed up for work.” 

Staff writer Dan Aceto can be reached at 282-4337, ext. 237.