The Difference between a LIS and a LIMS: A Guide
The terms Laboratory Information System (LIS) and Laboratory Information Management System (LIMS) tend to confuse people. While they have a number of similarities, causing people to use them interchangeably, there are some very important distinguishing factors between them. Before diving into these distinct factors, it is essential to understand what LIS and LIMS exactly are.
What is a LIS?
A Laboratory Information System or LIS is a healthcare software program that processes, stores, and manages patient data that’s related to laboratory processes and tests, tracks orders and results, and submits results from a searchable database. All these factors make it clear that a LIS is typically implemented in hospitals, clinics, public health, veterinary medicine, or laboratories. A laboratory information system like NovoPath is intended exclusively for laboratory functions. It also has multiple subsystems, such as a microbiology database and a blood bank system.
What is a LIMS?
A Laboratory Information Management System, commonly known as LIMS, is software that allows you to effectively manage your samples and related data. Labs can automate workflows and quickly manage samples along with other related pieces of information. In addition, they can also achieve reliable results faster and track data from sequencing runs over time and across multiple experiments, resulting in increased efficiency. LIMS can be used in any lab but are commonly used in medical, pharmaceutical tracking, and many more
LIS and LIMS often overlap and become difficult to distinguish. Today, with evolving technology and ever-changing requirements, LIS and LIMS have some things in common, such as sample tracking, centralized workflows, real-time data access, etc. In any case, learning to distinguish between a LIS and a LIMS is critical, so here are the top three factors that separate the two.
- Individual testing VS Batch testing
Arguably the biggest difference between the two is the fact that the LIS was created to focus on individual exams and to manage individual patient records. For example, when it comes to blood tests it is more focused on an individual patient, causing the results to be more reliable and accurate as the data is entered and stored one by one. Overall, LIS holds important information about patient health and can greatly contribute to improving patient care.
LIMS is essentially designed for batch testing, but it contains the information needed to test a specific product, including recipes, in pre-defined batch templates. These allow labs to register new batches quickly, and since they are working in batches, they can get much more work and results done, making them more efficient.
- Laboratory Types
A LIS is most commonly found in clinical laboratory settings such as physician’s office laboratories, reference laboratories, hospitals, and clinics. This allows clinical laboratories to report data on individual patients. The LIS has traditionally been designed to support lab compliance with regulatory bodies such as HIPAA. A LIS is used in the clinical setting and is most effective in enabling a smooth workflow in the laboratory, from the ease of patient data acquisition to the ability to enter and store it accurately.
The LIMS system, on the other hand, is commonly found in many environmental or research laboratories, including pharmaceutical, food, beverage, and water treatment plants. You may notice that all of these are much larger industries that require faster results so that multiple samples can be tested simultaneously, and the results obtained can be used to do the rest of the work. This is why it makes sense for the LIMS to be used here, as its batch testing allows all this to be done efficiently, saving you valuable time to invest in other aspects of your lab.
- Features:
The LIS system typically includes features such as patient management which includes critical data such as admission date, admitting physician, and all other aspects that come under admitting and discharging a patient. In addition to this, it also records patient demographic information, which includes their name, date of birth, blood type, ethnicity, and other information. This allows physicians and clinicians to treat each patient differently due to these features along with a diagnosis of past medical conditions, which are all done within the guidelines of various protocols such as the HL7, which is a standard for information exchange between healthcare information systems.
LIMS, on the other hand, typically include features such as batch tracking and control. In addition, LIMS also manages multiple product testing specifications by supporting compliance efforts and tracking reagents and lots.
Conclusion
LIS and LIMS systems can be difficult to distinguish because there are a host of similarities between the two. However, the three main factors mentioned above are what separate the two.
In summary, today’s LIS and LIMS are pushing into each other’s territory to capture greater market space and meet the needs of more types of labs. First and foremost, it is important to understand and recognize the shortcomings of each of these systems. It’s important to mention that LIS is not scalable and difficult to configure, this means that external provider support would be required, which may be costly. Some common problems you can run into when using these programs are software bugs. Therefore, make sure to keep them up to date. If you run a small clinic or hospital, LIS is perfect for you, as individual clinics and labs have had success with this type of system. On the other hand, if you run a large research or testing facility, a LIMS would be the better option.
This is why before you make this costly purchase that would no doubt benefit you in several ways, you must go through the factors mentioned above and then decide which one would fit best in your lab, allowing the processes to be done much more efficiently. These systems will not only increase efficiency but will also help you manage intensive data much more effectively. Therefore, by understanding the specifics of your work, you can make the correct choice.