April 3, 2019 - PITTCON 2019 Highlights – New twists refresh Pittcon
PITTCON celebrated its 70th year this year making it one of the oldest laboratory shows and still one of the largest US exhibitions we attend. The 2019 format, held at the Philadelphia Convention Center, was similar to last year with a five-day technical program and a three-day exhibition. Many US Labs, large and small, find PITTCON a great place to research LIMS. They are able to compare the main vendors in-depth over the course of the three days and get to understand them enough to make some initial choices and guide their future decisions over user requirements. Unlike in previous years there was no “Informatics” section, so those doing the research had to search out the LIMS vendors from the exhibitors.
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March 27, 2019 - Improving Laboratory Efficiency with Application Portfolio Rationalization
Industry-leading enterprises have tended to invest heavily in laboratory IT initiatives to drive the innovation necessary to stay competitive while improving laboratory efficiency. These organizations deploy applications for all the right reasons – reduce costs, improve organizational efficiency, drive innovation. Unfortunately, application bloat is an all too common occurrence across large organizations.
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March 27, 2019 - CloudLIMS @Bio-IT World Conference & Expo ’19, Boston, USA
March 27, 2019 - CloudLIMS Version 1.81 Released!
March 19, 2019 - Guiding Principles for Building a Smart Laboratory
Building a Smart laboratory involves a multi-disciplinary approach and a commitment to move away from traditional paper processes. Many day-to-day, routine laboratory operations are still carried out using manual, paper-based systems for everything from recording test results to managing inventories to documenting and scheduling instrument calibrations. This reliance on paper is not just expensive, it also decreases the efficiency of the laboratory workplace and leaves the laboratory vulnerable to having valuable data misplaced, lost or destroyed.
Technological advancements in wireless networks, laboratory equipment, sensor technologies, micro-electronics, informatics software and other areas have helped to spawn a digital revolution in connectivity in the modern laboratory. Forward-thinking organizations are capitalizing on this digital revolution to create highly integrated and automated smart laboratories that help facilitate product quality and efficiency in manufacturing processes, as well as enhanced innovation and product development through data analysis, process monitoring and continuous feedback.
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March 13, 2019 - Free Vs Commercial LIMS
March 13, 2019 - CloudLIMS @2019 Cannabis Science Conference East, Baltimore, USA
March 13, 2019 - New Trump Policy Makes Integrated Health Records a Reality
Today, I read a published Fortune magazine article written by Jared Kushner, Chris Liddell, and Seema Verma (http://fortune.com/2019/03/04/ehr-medicare-medicaid-jared-kushner/) entitled: “All Your Health Records in Once Place? This New Policy Could Make That a Reality”.
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March 6, 2019 - LIMS Selection for Genomics Labs
Next generation sequencing (NGS) is a parallel DNA sequencing technology that is able to carry out hundreds to millions of DNA sequencing reactions in parallel, along with the analysis of the sequencing data that is being produced. Utilizing this high-throughput NGS technology, researchers can now sequence an entire human genome quickly and relatively inexpensively, allowing the utilization of NGS data in scientific research in ways that just 10 years ago would have been considered cost-prohibitive.
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March 6, 2019 - CloudLIMS @AACR Annual Meeting 2019, Atlanta, USA
CloudLIMS is excited to exhibit at the AACR Annual Meeting 2019, to be held at the Georgia World Congress, Center, Atlanta, USA, from March 29 – April 3, 2019. We are proud to showcase our cloud-based Clinical LIMS, CloudLIMS, at booth 4055, from March 31-April 3, 2019.
To read the complete blog, please visit: https://cloudlims.com/blog/aacr2019.html
February 27, 2019 - Tips for Maintaining Laboratory Data Security
On June 27th, 2017, a massive ransomware attack infiltrated computer systems and locked up files (via encryption) at companies around the world and government ministries in Ukraine. Merck & Co. was among those affected. Merck employees arrived in their offices in the morning to find a ransomware note on their computers with hackers demanding payment to […]
February 20, 2019 - Tips for working with Master Data in LabWare
LabWare’s Enterprise Laboratory Platform (ELP) provides a Laboratory Informatics Management System (LIMS) and an Electronic Laboratory Notebook (ELN) that function together as a single integrated solution with a common, shared database. The LabWare solution provides an extremely flexible platform based entirely on open standards that can be configured to meet nearly any business need.
As much of LabWare’s functionality is data and template driven, the design and configuration of the master data (static data objects that are agreed upon and shared across the enterprise) is the most important aspect of any LabWare system. For both the initial implementation and ongoing activities, master data configuration has a dramatic impact on scalability and system maintenance activities. In this blog, we present a number of tips for master data configuration that will help to keep the core of your implementation solid and help to ensure that the system delivers a superior return on investment (ROI) over its lifetime for your organization.
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February 20, 2019 - Introducing Biotech Laboratory Informatics as a Service (LIaaS)
Biotechnology research and development organizations are finding themselves under pressure from many directions:
- Business stakeholders want improved operational efficiency, scalability, and agility, while keeping costs under control.
- Regulators are raising the standards and scrutiny of informatics systems demanding strong demonstrable control of data integrity through the entire lifecycle of laboratory data.
- Vendors of laboratory informatics systems traditionally labelled as LIMS, ELN, LES, LIS, SDMS, CDS are blurring the definitions of their systems as they add capabilities to increase their sales: all vendors are claiming to be able to solve all problems.
All while the volume of data generated and processed in scientific laboratories continues to increase dramatically and the pressure for data to make decisions grows. Scientists and their R&D organizations want improved data management practices and increased operational efficiency: an integrated laboratory informatics infrastructure that goes beyond the vendor acronyms and delivers digitized scientific processes.
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February 20, 2019 - Organizational Change Management for a Successful Lab Informatics Project
What do you call success? When it comes to a laboratory informatics implementation, the answer often depends on your perspective. A vendor may define success as getting the product into the production environment. A project manager might define success as an on-time, in scope, and on-budget delivery. And though both are common criteria for defining project success, on their own they are insufficient.
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February 13, 2019 - Six Tips to Optimize Your LabWare Implementation and Upgrades
LabWare’s Enterprise Laboratory Platform (ELP) is a leading laboratory informatics system that is utilized by over 1,000 customers – everything from small companies to global enterprises – worldwide. ELP provides a comprehensive laboratory solution that combines the typically separate domains of a Laboratory Informatics Management System (LIMS) and an Electronic Laboratory Notebook (ELN) into a single application environment with a common, shared database. The LabWare solution offers the benefits of both a LIMS and an ELN in a single platform that is both stable and supportable, without the IT complexity, expense and validation requirements of a customized interface layer.
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February 13, 2019 - Chemical Inventory Management Best Practices for BIOVIA CISPro
Companies that use chemicals in a lab or their manufacturing process need to effectively manage those chemicals to control costs and enhance safety. Companies in regulated industries also need to comply with numerous federal, state and local regulations covering chemical purchase, use, transportation, storage, emergency planning and disposal. Given the ever-present risk of inspection by either regulatory agencies or regulated customers, it is essential for regulated companies to create an effective system for maintaining safety information and up-to-date inventories for chemicals.
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February 13, 2019 - Data Privacy and Other Clinical Data Management Challenges
CloudLIMS hosted a complimentary webinar titled “Data Privacy and Other Clinical Data Management Challenges”. The webinar was presented by Marianne Henderson, Senior Advisor on biobanking to the National Cancer Institute’s (NCI) Center for Global Health and the Senior Advisor for Division Resources, Division of Cancer Epidemiology and Genetics (DCEG). We received an overwhelming response from the audience and got asked a number of interesting questions.
To read the complete blog, please visit: https://cloudlims.com/blog/webinar-highlights-data-privacy-and-other-clinical-data-management-challenges.html
January 23, 2019 - Ensuring Data Integrity with the Allotrope Framework
Data integrity is a hot topic as we move into 2019 and for good reason. Pharma and biotech companies produce an enormous amount of experimental R&D data. The sheer volume and complexity of the data makes managing this critical asset challenging. Leading companies are thus investing heavily in initiatives aimed at more effectively managing experimental data across its full lifecycle in hopes of driving the innovation necessary to stay competitive and ensure data integrity.
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January 23, 2019 - Factors to Consider When Choosing Your LIMS Project Manager
IT projects are notorious for high failure rates. Cloud portfolio management provider Innotas recently conducted a survey in which half of the businesses responding reported an IT project failure within the previous 12 months. Due to a wide range of factors, a successful laboratory information management system (LIMS) project can be particularly difficult to achieve.
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January 23, 2019 - To be Paperless or Not to be? That is the Question for the Scientific Laboratory
“To be [paperless], or not to be, that is the question.”(Hamlet, Act III Scene 1)
Or at least it used to be the question. Today many labs are finding themselves obligated to move away from using paper in the lab, either for productivity enhancement purposes or just from the need to more easily adhere to regulations that apply to them. If you are working in one of the labs that is still clinging to a ton of paper and has not turned on the servers and gone electronic, the task of reducing paper is not as daunting as it sounds. Many organizations decide to take baby steps when addressing their paper reduction goals while others throw the whole kit and caboodle in and go entirely paperless all at once. But either way you decide, the most important part is starting the discussion.
