By Yhordan Serpentini | October 20, 2022
If you have ever been to any practitioner’s office periodically, you would likely know the cycle of waiting for long periods in a room while being asked for personal information about your lifestyle, medical history, and current or past healthcare.
You may be asked about your medical history and other related information for documentation purposes in order for other clinics to have that available knowledge for further testing, diagnosing, treatment, etc.
A similar type of data recording, storing, and management process happens in laboratories called Laboratory Information System; but what is Laboratory Information System?
What is LIS?
Laboratory Information System, or LIS for short, is a type of software used by clinical laboratories to store, manage, or record any medical data. LIS has been consistently used for some time now, most commonly for sending laboratory test orders to lab instruments–from which they can then track and record the results of those orders to a searchable database within the clinic.
For example, if you were to receive a lab order to test your urine, that order will be tracked and the results will be recorded onto a database to which your practitioner has available access.
LIS is also used throughout clinics, hospitals, and laboratories–as well as other public health institutions–for recording and reporting any data that is labeled to be critical or concerning–such as infection status, STD diagnosis, immunology, patient care status, etc.
Functions of LIS
LIS serves many public health institutions and their associated labs with 14 major functions. According to the biomedical literature from MEDLINE, provided by PubMed®, the following include the major types of performances by the LIS software:
- Registration of test requests (point-of-care, molecular, genetic, etc.)
- Production of specimen collection sheets and identification labels
- Confirmation of specimen collection
- Production of aliquot labels
- Workload and management inquiry
- Production of worksheets
- Manual entry of test results
- Automated entry of test results
- Results inquiry
- Preliminary report
- Final Report
- Daily activities report
- Statistical and analytical reporting
- Billing
Benefits of LIS
LIS provides many public health institutions, their associated laboratories, and even patients with multiple benefits. Having patient information tracked and reported, statistical and analytical reports of test types, authorization, and results, as well as having production labels or reports of daily patient activities, can provide significant reductions in clerical work.
Furthermore, there are also better evaluations of workload, faster communication between clinics, physicians, and patients, improved information reports–as well as the accuracy of reports–adapted reference values, a faster billing process, and even improved retrieval operations.
Disclaimer: this blog is not intended to be medical advice
References:
Forest, J. C., Rheault, C., & Dang-Vu, T. K. (n.d.). The Laboratory Information System (LIS): I-application to the Clinical Chemistry Laboratory. Clinical biochemistry. Retrieved October 20, 2022, from https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/4017227/#:~:text=The%20system%20has%2014%20major,entry%20of%20test%20results%2C%20results
Laboratory information system. LIMSWiki. (2022, January 6). Retrieved October 20, 2022, from https://www.limswiki.org/index.php/Laboratory_information_system
- Lukić, V. (2017, July 14). Laboratory information system – where are we today? Journal of medical biochemistry. Retrieved October 20, 2022, from https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6287214/
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