Yes, Laboratory Information Management Systems are the need of the hour for any pathology clinic which is vying for a share of the market by differentiating its offering from the rest. While IT in Healthcare and particularly Lab Information management systems have been around from the last few decades, but it was not until the last few years that their popularity has become publically known. Most people will tell you LIMS implementation is easy and yes it is easy, but still, there are a few things that you must take care before you start your LIMS implementation journey.

Plan the Road Ahead

Customers need a Laboratory Information Management System but what purpose will it achieve is the answer they an answer to first. So to start with, clarify the purpose you are looking to achieve and define the scope of the project & the roadmap for implementing LIMS in your lab. With that in place, the implementation will have a clear cut path to follow and will know where to prioritize. Requirements may be generic business needs, user needs, IT needs, data management or report creation requirements.

Make Test Cases

Laboratory Information Management System can be tricky. What looks as easy as 1-2-3 may have a 1.1, 1.2, 1.5 in between. Reading between the lines and fully understanding the process is important here for you and your employees. The team must make be able to comprehend the objectives you set to achieve and devise the plan accordingly. The team must also make and run test cases to see obstacles that might crop up during implementation. The need to have business flowcharts made cannot be emphasized enough during the project.

Develop Strategies coinciding with Business Objectives

It cannot be emphasized enough that your expectation from the Laboratory Information System (LIMS) must be in line with your business objectives and business strategy. All the stakeholders in the process must know exactly what the system will look like post implementation and what purpose will it achieve. Some examples of objectives can be – streamlining the report sharing with clients or reduce paperwork.

Know the Data Types and Formats You Need

Information collection and collation is a key reason why LIMS are being implemented. Answer simple questions such as ‘What data do you want to capture, how will you make the primary key, can a string have letters/numbers or both, what is the limit of characters in a column. This will help you in avoiding the post implementation hiccups and humiliation.

Understand the Hardware Needs

Every laboratory has a pre existing set of IT infrastructure at their premises. So it becomes utmost important that a Laboratory Information Management System is implemented and tested on all IT infra available. That would mean, ensuring the browsers, software is all compatible with the LIMS being implemented. Most IT organizations that undertake LIMS implementation have their own set of software and hardware they provide support for. Hence, it is all the more important to have an updated hardware system.

Training

A step which is most important is also the one which is mostly ignored. Using the Laboratory Information Management System is important for each and every resource who would be using it. A proper training will help in easy operating of the system, developing a support functionality and thus increases productivity.

Data Security

In the times of big data and cloud based data, data security is of utmost importance. LIMS is used to access information about customers, health, history, medications et al. Since most LIMS can be accessed multi system, multi center, multi geography – there is a tight tab you need to keep for access to people.

Use Cases

Implementation, when completed, is put to test in the first 7 days, as a customer you must try and judge the new laboratory information management system against the test cases you prepared and objectives you set to achieve. Each and every test run must be shared with the implementation team and changes are made there off.  Feedback in this step is crucial – make sure your feedback to the implementation team is honest and timely so any problem can be solved before it becomes bigger.