FACS Core Fees & Policies

• Fee Schedule
• Billing Policy
• Appointment Policy
  • Sorter Appointments
  • Analyzer Appointments
• Cancellation Policy
• Priority of Use
   

Fee Schedule

 *Note: For Children's Hospital Los Angeles investigators, the first two appointments are FREE; Full Day Access Flat Fee: $500 (discuss with the director or manager for lengthy experiments)

Access to the FACS Core Facilities and services for non-Children's Hospital Los Angeles researchers at USC and other institutions can be arranged. Interested researchers should contact the core directors about availability and rates.
 

Billing Policy

All appointments will be rounded to the nearest quarter hour and billed in quarter-hour increments. Investigators may be asked to sign in acceptance of sort appointment length. 

• 2nd Floor Billing
  On the 2nd floor, an accounting software program monitors user login times and will record actual use time on the analyzers. The analyzers are booked for data acquisition, however, you may analyze on the cytometer during your appointment time, but you will incur charges for this analysis time, data analysis is free of charge on the designated analysis stations.
• Third Floor Billing
  On the 3rd floor, appointments are quantified according to the time of acquisition of the first and last tubes, as recorded by the computer.  Analyzers appointments will be billed in quarter hour increments.

Appointments will be tallied monthly and submitted to The Saban Research Institute administration for billing to the Principal Investigators of Children's Hospital Los Angeles.  The Flow Cytometry Core cannot be expected to be aware of any collaborations existing between the investigators, and therefore, will be billing according to the login account and user defined information.

• For Children's Hospital Los Angeles investigators, a valid project number will be requested and kept on file.  Please bring new project numbers as needed. 
• For non-Children's Hospital Los Angeles investigators, an invoice for services rendered will be emailed to the contact at the close of each month. Payments by purchase order number or check are to be sent to The Saban Research Institute, according to invoice details.
   

Appointment Policy

Sorter Appointment
Sorter appointment length is determined by the sort operator solely upon information given at time of appointment.  You will be asked for the following information:

• Desired final quantity of sorted cells.
• Frequency of the subpopulation to be sorted.
• Quantity of cells in initial population.
• Number of tubes which will be sorted.

Appointment length is based on the cell number of each sort specimen and the experimental design determines which cell sorter is used. In the end, you are billed for what you use, not for what we allotted time for. Appointments are accepted up to two weeks in advance and are finalized in the week prior to use.

Analyzer Appointment
For analyzer appointments, trained users and/or flow core personnel may schedule appointments, which:

• Are scheduled in half-hour blocks, with a maximum of two-hours for any one appointment.
• May be scheduled up to two weeks in advance.
• Must end by the scheduled time to maintain a courteous work environment.

Tampering with the appointment calendars is an unacceptable behavior for which offenders will be denied access to the Flow Cytometry Laboratory Resource. 

Analyzer Calendars

• Principal investigators working in The Saban Research Institute can make their appointments directly using our online calendars.
• Principal investigators from other facilities should contact the Core to set up an appointment. 
  
   

Cancellation Policy

We understand that the logistics of research experiments fluctuate and personal emergencies arise.  When those situations arise, please cancel your experiment as soon as possible to allow others access to the instrumentation by calling or emailing the personnel who manage the instrument you scheduled to use. 

Advanced Notice
Canceling an appointment, which would require the assistance from Core personnel, will require a minimum of 4 hours notice to avoid being billed at full rate for a minimum of one hour.  Morning appointments (beginning before noon) must be cancelled the previous evening by 5PM. 

There are occasions when the instruments go down, requiring unscheduled maintenance.  Any appointments cancelled due to down instrumentation will be not billed to investigators. In addition, if core staffing is unavailable for a scheduled sort, the investigator will not be billed.
 
 

Priority of use

Occasionally, clinical laboratory specimens are given priority for sorting and may occur with short notice.  For this reason, planned sorts may be occasionally cancelled or postponed when there is a clinical specimen requiring urgent sorting. It is a priority of the Flow Cytometry Laboratory to minimize the number of cancelled/rescheduled appointments of this type. Experiments involving timed animal studies have the next priority in that those experiments may be planned and booked outside of the two-week signup period for either the sorters or the analyzers. Experiments involving timed animal studies have the next priority to accommodate.