Top 9 Ways a LIMS Can Help Your Clinical Laboratory
Between COVID-19 and an increase in the aging population, demand for diagnostic testing is at an all time high. On average 1.3 million COVID tests are run daily, and the American Clinical Laboratory Association (ACLA) reports 7 billion diagnostic tests are run each year. All this to say, your clinical laboratory is busier than ever. You’re taking on a higher workload while facing a worsening staffing shortage crisis. To balance, you’re having to extend shifts and ask staff to take on longer hours as you look for solutions to make the workload more manageable. However, personnel resources seem to be in short supply.
You and your team need a helping hand. While it cannot add personnel to your workforce, a laboratory information management system (LIMS) can help free-up more staff time by simplifying your workflow and automating certain tasks. Often called the file clerk f the lab, a LIMS can help you reduce manual processes and increase operational efficiencies, so you spend more time running tests and less time in paperwork.
Here are the top eight ways a LIMS can help your clinical laboratory:
1.) Automated Results Data Entry
One of the biggest areas a LIMS can help optimize your workflow is with results data entry. LabLynx ELab LIMS can interface with almost any instrument, automating data entry from your lab equipment to the LIMS. This process takes this workflow step from minutes to seconds – saving you time and reducing potential transcription errors that arise from manual entry. We support both bidirectional and unidirectional interfaces with several options to upload results in an effective and efficient manner.
2.) Report Building and Sending
Create reports in minutes. With LabLynx ELab LIMS, you can design report templates that reflect the information you want to share. You can easily add the test results to the report template and have it ready to send within seconds. Once it’s ready to send, you can email and/or fax the report directly from the system. If using a physician or patient portal, you can also publish the report to the secure portal for seamless sharing.
3.) Simplified Sample Tracking
Never lose a sample again and know where your samples are at all times with LabLynx ELab LIMS. From sample accessioning to report result sending, you can track your sample location, who touched it last, when it was last seen, how much of it was used in testing, where it’s stored after test completion and all associated data in between. All information is reportable for KPI tracking and audit preparation.
4.) Secure Contact Management
Manage patient and physician records in a secure, HIPAA compliant environment. Our cloud infrastructure is housed in a state-of -the-art data center, certified to the highest SSAE SOC 2 standards. Furthermore, our in-house development team monitors our servers 24/7 to ensure maximum data security. You can manage patient data, records and communication with ease in a user-friendly system.
5.) Streamlined Communication with Physicians
Reduce calls to your lab as LabLynx ELab LIMS offers physician portals that interface with the LIMS in real time allowing for streamlined communication with your most important audience. Through the portal, physicians can submit test requisitions through an easy to use online form. Your lab can add fields to the form for the information your lab needs, avoiding miscommunication and spent time tracking down missing information. As tests are in progress, physicians can get status updates in the portal, indicating what stage the tests are in and reducing the number of phone calls to your lab. Result reports can be posted to the portal as soon as they are ready for easy access and quicker physician review.
6.) Direct Communication with Patients
Interact with patients directly and easily using a patient portal that interfaces with the LIMS. Patients can create accounts and sign-up for testing events your lab is offering through the portal. After testing is completed, patients can receive results on the portal as soon as the reports are ready.
7.) Easier Regulatory Compliance
Maintaining regulatory compliance can be hard – especially in the fast-paced laboratory industry. With LabLynx ELab LIMS, we can make maintaining regulatory compliance a bit easier. With chain-of-custody tracking, maintenance history logs, calibration records, secure data protocols and more, our solution is designed to meet your lab’s specific documentation and process needs. Our ELab LIMS solution has built in features to support CLIA, HIPAA, 21 CFR PART 11, ISO 17025 and more.
8.) System Integrations
Not only does our LIMS share data with instruments, it can also integrate with third-party systems. EHRs, EMRs, QuickBooks, ADS, our LIMS can pass data between systems in your lab’s tech stack to save you time. No longer do you have to dig for and manually enter information from one system to the next, LabLynx ELab LIMS can streamline this process by sharing information directly between multiple systems in real-time.
9.) Instrument Management
Say goodbye to spreadsheets and paper logs for tracking instrument maintenance and calibration history. You can document when the actions were performed directly in the LIMS to create clear history logs of work performed that is tied to each instrument. Not just for historical data tracking, you can create maintenance and calibration schedules for future repairs and receive alerts when the actions are coming due.
Make managing your heavy workflow a little easier with a LIMS designed specifically to support your clinical laboratory. Our flexible and highly configurable LIMS solution can tailor to meet your laboratory’s unique needs to help you optimize your workflow and maximize your existing resources. To get started and learn more about our LabLynx ELab LIMS system, click here to connect with a member of our team or sign up for our email updates below.
