Ethan Dominique O. Pipo
MT 14-LEC-DD
Today’s technological advancements have made work easier, more efficient, and better. In the medical field, particularly in Medical Technology, the laboratory needed to be able to manage data and process it better, thus the Laboratory Information System was born. The LIS is a computer system that manages all aspects of a medical laboratory. including inputting, processing, and storing data.

Laboratory Information Systems are crucial to today’s labs due to their ability to be efficient, secure, and improve patient care quality. An LIS system has 2 main components, the first being Specimen tracking. Specimen tracking helps laboratories know where samples are in the testing process.

It tracks specimens from receipt, processing, testing, and reporting to storage. It also gets results from the lab equipment and stores them with specimen details. And, it has protocols and algorithms for testing and result determination.

The second is patient tracking. Patient tracking is like a system that helps doctors and nurses keep track of how a person is doing. It can show their progress, keep important details about the person and their samples, and make sure they get the right care.

Not every lab is the same though, and they must have different laboratory information systems and not one. Other laboratory information systems include programs like LITS Plus, Epi Info 2002, Astro, MS Access, Visual Basic, and SAS (a special kind of software for stats and analysis). Choosing the right one depends on things like the type of lab, how much work it does, the tests it does, how many people work there, what systems it already has, and what it needs to do.

It’s important for the lab and computer teams to work together. They should make sure that LIS is a top priority. This means they need to change how the lab works and do some other things too.

The Laboratory Information System runs on a small computer, and it lets the lab have full control over its daily tasks. Collection of results from automated analyzers gets accomplished via a micro-computer/micro-processor network. It can record, manage, update, and store patient testing data for clinical and anatomic pathology laboratories.

When you enter the data, it’s like putting in individual pieces of information that don’t mean much on their own. But when you put them together and study them, they can show important information. Besides gathering data, the LIS can also get test requests, send them to the lab, get test results and quality checks, and share the results with an EHR, practice management system, or other info system.

The LIS has helped many medical labs better our patient care and healthcare outcomes. It has become an integral part of laboratories today and will continue to develop as the years go on. The LIS will continue to develop and evolve as time goes on, as the need for improved patient care is always present.

As well as the always-increasing demand for secure and efficient data management and analysis in the healthcare industry.

Resources: What is LIS Software and How Does it Work? (n.d.). Orchard Software. https://www.orchardsoft.com/resources/learn-about-lis/

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