Hospital Lab to Ref Lab

One of our hospital clients had a legacy Laboratory Information System (LIS) and a large volume of business with some major reference labs, specifically:

• Mayo
• ARUP
• Quest

Since their legacy LIS was due to be replaced in a few year, their management did not want to spend very long or very much to interface it. Since the volume of specimens was high the value of the interfaced tests was high, the bench techs desperately needed automation.

We created an end-to-end solution in a matter of weeks:

1. we used their legacy system's instrument interface to detect orders and request results
2. we put a custom database in the middle
3. we set up the secure infrastructure between the client and their various ref labs
4. we created a separate TCP/IP, HL7 output to each the various ref labs

The bench techs did not have to do anything, the interfacing was completely automatic: orders out, collection labels with the correct ref lab order on them, results in.