LABORATORY INFORMATICS

Integration can free analysts as many companys seek ways to simplify the result entry procedures in their laboratories.

 

Simplify Result Entry Procedures in Clinical Laboratories

Business and Technology Goals

A major pharmaceutical had empowered its clinical labs with the ability to record test result data in a series of pre-configured Excel spreadsheets. Technicians transfer results from instruments into the worksheets, and those results are then manually transcribed into a SQL*LIMS 4.1 system. In addition to being time-consuming, this approach presents inherent risks to the data, including data corruption and transcription errors. Our client sought to provide its laboratories with a secure and efficient solution that automates the integration of Excel and SQL*LIMS.

Solution

LabAnswer immediately identified an opportunity to leverage existing Excel worksheets and produce a versatile, bi-directional interface with SQL*LIMS. With solutions that interface LIMS, accuracy, security, and performance are of utmost importance. The LabAnswer solution meets all these goals while preserving simplicity and ease of use.

Each Excel worksheet is managed by an administrator who executes a worksheet function to load the latest method data from SQL*LIMS. Once this download is complete, the worksheet is ready for delivery to the lab for result entry. A lab technician populates the worksheet manually or by transferring instrument results from a file, and then clicks a single button to post these results to SQL*LIMS. The solution validates these results before committing them to the LIMS database and even logs additional samples into the LIMS when necessary. This seamless transition of data is achieved without significant changes to the existing process.

Benefits

  • Single point of entry for result data
  • Secure and efficient posting of results to LIMS
  • Easily capable of supporting multiple testing methods
  • Integration frees analysts