CAP TODAY Pathology/Laboratory Medicine/Laboratory Management
Jonnaert
Jonnaert envisions smaller, more integrated multiplexing instruments, and more tests being done in physician office labs and smaller regional, rural laboratories, which will also require more integrated operational and administrative functions. Those evolutions will definitely not lead to the disappearance of the LIS, he says.
“What’s important here is that a simple connectivity standard can be the enabler for a comprehensive, global data standardization program that could address much larger health care data analysis issues—epidemiological cluster analysis, for example—but that is a whole other topic altogether.”
He views the LAW profile standard as possibly moving some of the middleware functions. “The low level physical connectivity and data mapping that was the middleware vendors’ traditional space, that of course goes away as you adopt standards like the LAW profile. But the LAW profile is also a lot more—and essentially it could over time move more middleware functions to the LIS.”
How would this happen? “You can have the work instructions sent directly from an LIS or from a bigger system to an instrument. And you would have a work order for this and this and this test. ‘Are you able to execute it?’ And the instrument can reply, ‘Yes, I’m available,’ or ‘No, I’m not. Send it down the track to another instrument that may be able to do it.’ All of that is defined in this LAW profile standard.”
In essence, “This standard will absolutely promote a sleeker, more efficient, less cluttered stream of data management,” Jonnaert says. “First of all, it will significantly reduce the costs to connect new instruments in the lab to an LIS, still ranging between $3,000 and $20,000. Now, it truly becomes a plug-and-play scenario, and the data format is standardized.”
If you walk into a laboratory today, “you will still find a lot of instruments that have ‘dongles’ hanging on the back that do conversions from a serial port to the network. And some of the middleware and LIS companies made these custom connections.”
“With the LAW profile, all of that goes away. You connect the instrument to the network, you have your LIS already on the network, you establish a connection, and you open a data stream—done.” Since the standard is now commercially available and ready for implementation, he says, it is important that laboratories start including it as a requirement in their requests for proposals and demand support for the standard as they work with their vendors.
More than likely, as adoption of the LAW profile expands, “we will see less use of middleware as it no longer fulfills the basic connectivity function,” Jonnaert says. Nevertheless, “Middleware will continue to play an important role for many years to come because we have a lot of legacy instruments, and the middleware vendors are now offering more essential LIS-like functionality.”
[hr]Anne Paxton is a writer in Seattle.