Revolutionizing Clinical Testing by Automating Your Laboratory

As you may know, clinical testing is a highly complex process and, although laboratories are relatively safe, they are not always as safe as they could be. Clinical labs have focused on their quality control and assessment programs dealing with analytical aspects of testing. However, a growing amount of evidence shown over recent years has demonstrated that quality in clinical labs can’t be assured by focusing on pure analytical aspects.

The more recent surveys on errors in clinical labs show that in the delivery of testing, mistakes tend to occur before (pre-analytical) and after (post-analytical) the test has been performed. Most of the errors are due to pre-analytical factors, while a high error rate (18.5-47% of total errors) has been found in the post-analytical phase.

Many mistakes in the testing process are called "laboratory errors", these may be due to poor communication, action taken by others involved in the testing process (e.g., physicians, nurses and phlebotomists), or poor organization, all of which are beyond the laboratory's control.

But there is a high quality professional system that can get these errors under control.

How You Have Helped

Many Clinical labs that have taken advantage of the LIS system have minimized risks and significantly decreased errors within their testing. Tracking and organizing every step of the way, the LIS system increases quality control, testing management and lab organization.

Typical LIS systems enable:

• Recording of all requests for all tests
• On-line, real-time linking of the LIMS to automated analytical instruments
• Sample tracking and workflow management
• Worksheet generation for manual tests
• Automated validation of test results
• Real-time recording of quality control data
• Electronic delivery of results to clinical users
• Implementation of decision support systems to enhance clinical outputs

One of the largest impacts of your current LIS systems has been to make the internal operations of the lab a relatively paper-free environment, in contrast to clinical areas within hospitals and more in line with the well-developed IT systems. The LIS systems log all requests for tests, transmit these on-line, and in real-time, to automated analytical instruments and receive back the test results. The operation is usually controlled by use of unique bar-coded sample IDs to minimize the risks of data transcription errors. Once work is completed reports are printed and ready for dispatch to clinics, and this reporting is now also virtually electronic. In addition to this basic control of workflow the LIS systems provide a multitude of other sophisticated functions. They track quality control samples and this data is a major component in the quality assurance procedures of the laboratory alongside tracking capability of many analytical instrument control systems.

With all the features an LIS system has to offer, we have revolutionized clinical testing. While some systems may come at a high price, it’s worth the investment when eliminating room for error which can cost more than a pretty penny.

Contact us for further questions on what the LIS system can do for you.

PROLIS is one of the leading clinical laboratory information system designed to enhance the performance of hospitals and reference labs of all sizes.