Several years ago I worked for a national lab. Our company’s individual AP labs of different sizes and specialties were sprinkled from coast to coast. The network functioned with each lab maintaining a considerable amount of autonomy and labs’ LIS systems ranged from antiquated to new and shiny and from home-brew DOS-based to the latest…
Today almost every pathology lab director has “interfacing” as a line item on their weekly staff meeting agenda. As more referring physicians implement EMR systems and ramp up their meaningful use (MU) of these technologies to grab their piece of the Federal Government’s HITECH incentive dollars, the demand for LIS-to-EMR interfacing increases. Check out a previous post describing the…
We’ve already discussed the benefits of SaaS in healthcare especially those applications that provide opportunity for customization. But are all SaaS platforms equal? No…you guessed it… they certainly are not. In choosing a SaaS platform in healthcare, there are several criteria that need to be examined. The check list should including the following at a minimum: Redundancy –…
The Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) model has been in existence for many years and continues to successfully prove out its value proposition compared to traditional legacy software system models. We published a post a few months ago on the total cost of ownership (TCO) benefits of SaaS. The healthcare industry was slower initially in its adoption of…
Challenges and questions still remain as we enter the new era of Healthcare IT. The fit of practices and vendors depends largely on the willingness and commitment of all parties to roll up their collective sleeves to tackle obstacles identified and the one lying right around the corner. Will your business’ growth be stunted by…
While it seems that most healthcare providers are hoping to get to the stage where health information systems (EMR/EHR, LIS, RIS, etc.) provide more workflow efficiency, extreme data security and flexible partner collaboration, the path to Utopia seems to be different in almost every case. This is due to the fact that each provider is…
We are looking forward to attending the 15th Annual Executive War College on Laboratory and Pathology Management in New Orleans – April 27-28th. The agenda is full of great sessions on lab workflow efficiencies, interoperability, and next generation lab automation. Here a few of the sessions we plan to attend – April 27th 7:00 AM–7:50…
As the adoption of electronic health records (EHR) continues to increase, so does the need to connect lab systems to EMR software. Interfaces are usually one-way, or uni-directional, enabling a referring physician system to receive results from the laboratory. But the next wave to hit involves the use of a bi-directional interface where referring physician’s…