LABORATORY INFORMATICS GUIDE 2013 | TECHNOLOGY TRENDS
THE INFORMATICS LANDSCAPE
The laboratory informatics market has undergone a number of realignments in the last few years, as John Trigg, director of phaseFour Informatics, explains
F
or the past few decades, laboratories have been engaged in a slow-moving journey towards a paperless
existence. We all know that paper won’t completely go
away, but basically, paper will no longer have a role as either an operational or archive medium for laboratory information. At the heart of this change are a set of laboratory informatics tools, which have taken on myriad operational and management functions for laboratory data and information. For a number of laboratories, this process is well advanced; for others there’s still a way to go. The well-established driving forces for the
journey are (a) productivity improvement, and (b) knowledge management. For all laboratories, their primary business
driver is a set of financial and scientific objectives. The current business climate, dominated
by cost reduction and shareholder value, will therefore put ever-increasing emphasis on the financial performance of scientific or technological investments, and this sets the agenda for change. The decision and justification to deploy
laboratory informatics systems is therefore taken on the grounds of productivity improvements, usually with some unquantifiable, softer options thrown into the cost-benefit equation. In most cases, the laboratory informatics
tools successfully deliver a return on investment. But this is only the start of the journey, because the business will continue to demand further improvements and cost reductions. So, the big question is: where will these further improvements appear? Can laboratory informatics deliver more than it is currently doing, and can it do more to support scientific output, rather than laboratory throughput?
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THINK ‘BIG’ The convergent nature of modern laboratory informatics tools is gradually taking us away from a traditional application-centric approach to addressing laboratory requirements, and forcing us to think more broadly about the full scope and scale of the lab operations, and how they integrate with the rest of the business, its suppliers and customers. With trends towards entity-based systems and modularity, a number of vendors now offer a platform approach that can be tailored to meet a variety of functional and industry-specific requirements. Furthermore, the number of merger and acquisitions in the laboratory informatics market in recent years has resulted in key players establishing comprehensive solutions to address a wider range of requirements. For Kim Shah, global director of marketing
at Thermo Fisher Scientific, adopting a holistic approach to improving laboratory productivity is dependent on assessing the broader business processes in order to identify bottlenecks. By employing formal methodologies and tools, an organisation can uncover opportunities for process improvement and resulting cost savings within the realm of data integration, laboratory automation and human processes; all of which can benefit from technology-based solutions. Taking this wider view and utilising a programmatic approach to organisational workflow assessment can lend itself to long- term flexibility and adaptability. Glyn Williams, VP of product delivery at
IDBS, agrees that a holistic view is critical. In many instances, business deals create bottlenecks – externalisation being a typical example – and the expectation is that technology can fix them. The distribution of laboratory work across different collaborating companies and across different geographies creates a business, technical and cultural challenge in which technology is an important
enabler. Thin-client, hosted systems provide a potential solution, assuming that access control, IP, training and support issues can be managed successfully. The laboratory environment is
technologically conservative; the various constraints such as regulatory, legal, health and safety, and governance issues related to laboratory processes and data do not encourage regular change, but on the other hand, where new technologies may offer benefit, the challenge is for the vendors to respond. Backwards compatibility, legacy and cultural constraints can be an impediment to keeping up, and the bigger the company, the bigger the challenge. Clive Collier, owner of Two Fold Software, sees this as favouring smaller vendors, where a product can be re-engineered with lower risk, to ensure that it operates on an up-to-date platform, and to provide rapid development by using the latest tools. There is a growing level of interest in how
consumer technologies can enhance the user experience of working with laboratory informatics tools. With their focus on sharing, collaboration, interaction, and ready access to information, consumer technologies exhibit some considerable synergy with the high- level criteria associated with current business requirements. Primarily, these focus on ‘mobile’ (portable devices), ‘cloud’ (access from anywhere), ‘big data’ (the need to be able to
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