Beaufort Coroner celebrates season of change: new high-tech machines, elite accreditation
With new high-tech machinery and an elite accreditation under its belt, the Beaufort County Coroner’s Office is quickly becoming a standout agency of its type — both in South Carolina and nationwide.
Headed by Coroner David Ott, the Port Royal office recently installed two new pieces of equipment with a combined value of about $570,000, made possible by the Lowcountry Healthcare Coalition and grants through the Charleston County Coroner’s Office. The new technology will save money, expedite autopsies and provide critical insight into local public health matters, according to the coroner and members of his staff.
The facility’s upgrades coincided with another important achievement: accreditation from the International Association of Coroners and Medical Examiners (IACME), awarded to coroner’s offices whose policies and practices meet a rigorous set of industry standards. After a final assessment in late 2022, the Beaufort County Coroner’s Office became the 35th agency nationwide to be recognized by the IACME, which is headquartered in Las Vegas.
The newly awarded accreditation not only ensures standardized and up-to-date practices within the office’s staff, but will also boost their chances of receiving state or federal grants in the future, said Jeff Dowling, who served as accreditation manager during the nine-month application process.
“The big thing you got to remember, too, is this is all voluntarily done,” Dowling told The Island Packet and Beaufort Gazette. “It shows that the coroner wants nothing but the best for the citizens and visitors of Beaufort County and the employees of the coroner’s office.”
The coroner’s office is responsible for investigating all suspicious, violent, sudden and unexpected deaths in Beaufort County. A Beaufort native and former investigator with the city’s police department, Ott served as deputy coroner for 11 years before being elected to the office’s top spot in 2020.
Big upgrades, big opportunities
One of the office’s new machines is the first of its kind to be installed in the state: a $500,000 Lodox high-speed digital scanner, which can conduct a full-body X-ray in about 13 seconds. The device has been called a “game changer” within the industry, as its ability to detect traumatic injury and foreign objects in the body — such as bullets — can help medical examiners avoid more invasive parts of an autopsy, which often involve the removal of organs.
The scanner will completely replace the coroner’s traditional X-ray procedure, which had to be done in portions to manually create a full-body scan. That process could often take upwards of an hour.
The staff’s second new tool is quite a bit smaller, but is likely to save even more time and money. Valued at about $70,000, the Randox MultiSTAT is a rapid toxicology analyzer that can detect up to 500 types of drugs from a small sample of blood, urine or saliva.
Before the Randox, outsourcing toxicology analysis to Charleston could take weeks. Now, the Beaufort County team can have results back within 30 minutes — not only helping staff get answers to family members much more quickly, but also allowing local officials to improve their responses to the ongoing opioid epidemic.
At the Charleston County Coroner’s Office, home to South Carolina’s only other Randox, medical examiners use the machine’s rapid results to track geographical trends in drug use, teaming up with other agencies to act more proactively than ever before.
“It lets us see trends really fast,” said Bobbi Jo O’Neal, who has served as coroner in Charleston County since 2020. “We’re seeing stress in certain neighborhoods and can notify law enforcement or the Department of Mental Health ... or our Opioid Task Force, and then they hit that neighborhood pretty hard with Narcan and education.”
The new machinery will also greatly reduce the coroner’s office reliance on facilities at the Medical University of South Carolina (MUSC), which were often used by the county for autopsies and toxicology tests, according to Ott.
“(MUSC) does a great job, but they are servicing lots of other outlying counties,” O’Neal said. “So the delay for services has gotten pretty extensive if you were to put Beaufort and Charleston back into the mix.”
Reflecting on the agency’s achievements this past year, Ott stressed that none of it would have been possible without his colleagues.
“When they put my name on this, I told them my name shouldn’t have even been on it,” said Ott, motioning toward the office’s IACME accreditation plaque. “Because this is us; this is the coroner’s office. This isn’t about me. We couldn’t have done it if it wasn’t for the whole staff pitching in.”
This story was originally published December 22, 2023 at 2:01 PM.
