Article by dana_h
In an era of increased competitiveness, economic uncertainty, ever-increasing regulation and global turmoil, companies are striving to continually improve operational efficiency. Many are looking to information technology to provide reductions in operating costs and increased efficiency by automating and streamlining existing business processes. This article outlines the experiences of one company, Altrix Heathcare plc as they implemented their laboratory information management system.Altrix Healthcare plc has established the largest specialist oral fluid testing laboratory in Europe. They provide a full screening and confirmation testing service for drugs of abuse, and a screening service for disease markers. This is achieved through the collection of an oral sample, based on technology originally developed for HIV screening in the USA in the late 1980′s. Samples can be collected almost anywhere by a trained member of staff or an external collector in a procedure that takes under two minutes, eliminating the inconvenience of collecting a blood or urine sample. The sample collected is known as Oral Mucosal Transudate (OMT); an ultra-filtrate of blood that is ideal not only to detect drugs and their metabolites but also to screen for blood borne viruses and other disease markers.From a single donor sample taken for drugs of abuse testing, it is possible to screen for a wide range of substances and their metabolites, such as opiates and morphine specific compounds (including heroin), cocaine (including crack cocaine), benzodiazepines (such as valium), amphetamines (including speed), methamphetamines (including Ecstasy), cannabinoids, methadone, buprenorphine, barbiturates, PCP and propoxyphene. With regard to disease marker screening, a sample taken using similar technology can be used to provide initial screening for Hepatitis B, Hepatitis C and HIV. This means that wider screening of high-risk groups can be undertaken without unnecessarily exposing health care workers to risk.Based on this collection technology, Altrix offer tailored services to a range of organizations in the health, clinical justice and corporate sectors. OMT testing is widely used by both criminal justice and drug treatment providers as these services have identified the many benefits it offers, such as a quick, easy collection that is almost impossible to cheat, a morphine specific screen that identifies likely heroin use, not just broader use of opiates and GC/MS confirmation testing that helps distinguish between cocaine and crack and will identify the use of heroin.One of the most important aspects of this type of testing is that of defensibility. There are two central meanings for defensibility in this context. The first questions whether the testing technique, and all its associated processes, will withstand critical courtroom scrutiny and so form a successful basis for court, tribunal, or disciplinary proceedings. The second questions whether the use of the technique is consistent with good employment practices. A full treatment of these issues is beyond the scope of this article; however one aspect of defensibility must be the reliability of the result obtained by the testing laboratory. This opens up issues such as chain of custody, sample size, sample identity, quality assurance, method validation and accreditation and result traceability. It is in these areas, as well as those pertaining to general operational efficiency, that the laboratory information management system comes into its own.
The laboratory information management system (LIMS)
When the company first started, Altrix installed separate systems for Customer Services and Laboratory Management that were developed in house. Although these systems worked well in the early days, as the company became more successful, their limitations started to seriously impede the company’s growth. For instance, because the two systems were separate, situations could arise in which samples were logged into the laboratory system but customer services were unaware of their existence. The system could not support parallel processing of sample batches, resulting in increased costs for the business owing to the payment of overtime for laboratory staff. Some specialist activities, such as the quality assurance of completed microplates, could not be performed by the laboratory system, requiring additional third party software and introducing data transcription issues. Instrument interfacing was very limited, again resulting in costs for re-typing data with the consequent risk of transcription errors.In November 2002, Altrix’s Board of Directors, faced with increasing sample volumes, decided to investigate the replacement of their existing IT applications with a single, integrated COTS (Commercial Off the Shelf) solution. After demonstrations and discussions with various potential suppliers, they chose the STARLIMS
