How to get the most out of your LIMS
Emma Henly, Senior clinical scientist, Warrington and Halton Teaching Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust
In April I was fortunate to be awarded a regional education bursary to attend “The digital landscape in laboratory medicine” conference in Leeds. It was a very interesting day and all of the speakers were very knowledgeable. Modern clinical laboratories cannot function without IT systems and this conference explored innovative projects that have benefited the clinical service and patient care.
“The only product of the clinical laboratory is information”
This was a quote by William Dito (1979), presented by University Hospitals Birmingham. The generation of information is the end product of appropriate test selection, specimen collection, analysis, reporting, and interpretation. How do we ensure all of this? How do we make sure that the patient gets the right result, at the right time?
The presentation discussed how integrating clinical systems to produce a networked information system that is all linked together reduces duplicate testing, enables faster decision making, leads to better patient pathways, and increases user satisfaction.
LIMS projects
Northumbria Healthcare NHS FT shared their experience of their new LIMS system project. They were able to implement such measures as paperless requesting, labelling at source, sample tracking, discipline specific requesting pages in ICE to optimise requesting, and capturing data e.g thyroxine dose at request.
A talk from Cheshire and Merseyside collaborative gave useful insights into how to build your LIMS. Why do you want a result to trap? Is it because you want to perform an action (e.g phone or add a comment), review the quality of the result, or to learn/maintain competency? Is there anything that can have automated coded comments – look for high volume, low complexity to see a benefit on your queues!
Patient care
Big data that is generated from your LIMS can be used to improve patient care. A study was presented by Royal Wolverhampton NHS trust found that serum amylase results were significantly higher for Black and Asian patients compared to White patients, resulting in the verification of new reference intervals for these patients. Data from 176,555 individuals were included in the study and this highlights how the information in our LIMS is a vast resource that can be used for the benefit of all patients.
Conclusion
Thank you to the association of laboratory medicine for awarding me the bursary! I really enjoyed the day, it was well organised and the venue was ideal. It was a very well attended conference and I would definitely encourage anyone with an interest in digital pathology to attend further conferences like this.