Understand and Demonstrate Your Lab’s Value by Leveraging Your LIS

What are the top three considerations that an LIS can address in today’s clinical labs?­

The following are the top considerations when selecting a lab information system (LIS), in order of importance:

1. Current and future needs of the lab’s customers: Selecting an LIS based on long-term needs will prevent you from having to keep replacing your LIS, which can be quite disruptive to the lab.
2. Lab workflow and efficiency: Consider ongoing lab staffing challenges since maximizing efficiency is critical today and into the future.
3. Regulatory and compliance requirements.

What are the benefits of a cloud-based LIS?

Here are some of the key reasons customers move to a cloud-based LIS:

1. Data security, reliability, and disaster recovery: just recently, a lab that flooded moved to a cloud-based LIS because the recovery from that flood was both difficult and costly.
2. Budgeting: A subscription-based LIS model has fixed payments, allowing labs to budget across several years without spikes in cost, such as those incurred when replacing hardware.
3. Outsourcing some staffing needs: LIS companies with cloud-based services can typically provide additional staffing help or services to reduce the labor burden on lab staff.

How does Orchard’s LIS address the needs of today’s labs?

We're proud of Orchard’s portfolio of solutions: We spend a great deal of time and effort thinking about the businesses that our labs serve and tailor our LIS solutions to best serve each lab’s needs. One example is our molecular testing module integrated into Orchard’s Enterprise LIS, which we developed when the labs we worked with started molecular testing for COVID-19. Another example is our point-of-care solution, which is also in Enterprise. We work with many labs that are part of a large medical group with value-based contracts for point-of-care data, so this point-of-care solution helps send claims to payers with Current Procedural Terminology (CPT) codes to close care gaps.

At Orchard, we have expertise for integrating with analyzers, automation lines, electronic medical records (EMRs), reference labs, and CDC and Department of Health interfaces. All of our solutions are highly configurable, and our advanced rules-based technology improves workflows and overall lab efficiency.

Orchard has been developing the LIS for 30 years. what is the greatest change you have seen and foresee in the next five years?

At the broadest and strategic level, the biggest changes have been the increasing pressure labs face to reduce healthcare costs, as well as staffing challenges. The pressure to reduce prices will only be relieved when the value surpasses the cost of lab tests. Thus, labs need to use analytics to support laboratory stewardship and demonstrate how appropriate lab testing actually reduces healthcare burdens in the long run.

Moving forward, LIS innovation with AI and accelerated data integration for better analytics will help reveal lab efficiencies. Along with data from outside the lab, LIS-based analytics (such as from our upcoming Orchard Insights solution) can help demonstrate the value of clinical labs to the broader healthcare ecosystem, ultimately improving reimbursement and overall productivity.