LABORATORY INFORMATICS
Transforming the laboratory
SOPHIA KTORI DISCUSSES THE NEED FOR DIGITAL TRANSFORMATION IN THE LABORATORY
Specialist consultancy firm Astrix Technology Group works with life science organisations to identify
and implement systems for scientific informatics and laboratory operations, to maximise value from scientific data, improve product and experimental quality, and aid safety, security and regulatory compliance. Dale Curtis, Astrix president, said:
‘We’re not a technology company and we don’t make software, but that’s a big advantage for us because we can take a vendor-neutral stance and really help companies to look at their operations and workflows, and identify just how they can start to approach digital transformation.’ Sometimes that transformation will start from a very basic position of an initial move away from pen and paper, and sometimes from the point of acknowledging that their legacy informatics systems are no longer viable.
Review and be realistic Whatever the ultimate aim, any attempt at digital transformation should start with a review of existing processes, and consider what the organisation hopes to realistically achieve, in terms of optimising those processes. ‘The goal may be to remove the need for manual data entry, but to do that you have to understand your processes and your process flow, to understand the end-to- end workflow,’ Curtis said. ‘Organisations need to take a tactical approach based on need, rather than just focus on the software that’s out in the marketplace.’ Astrix has built its expertise on many
years of researching laboratory best practices and implementing solutions for scientific and laboratory-based
18 Scientific Computing World Autumn 2020
organisations. ‘One starting point can be to measure just how much time scientists spend on activities such as the manual transcription of data from one system to another, data review verification, reports preparation, extraction of data,’ Curtis noted. ‘Digitising some of all of these activities can dramatically improve efficiency and productivity, as well as help to ensure data integrity and improve downstream quality. But you have to go through your processes to understand how that digitisation needs to be implemented.’ In reality, companies are often quick
to flood laboratories with software, he suggested. ‘They may have a dozen or more informatics systems, including multiple LIMS and ELNS from different vendors, which don’t talk to each other. That causes another set of problems.’
Consider bite-size chunks Companies commonly approach Astrix because they want to understand how digitalisation can deliver value back to their organisations in a commercially reasonable timeframe, Curtis suggested. ‘They may have been told by vendors that digital transformation will eventually transform the way that business is done, but that it will be a three-year initiative and cost however many million dollars. That’s just not tenable for most organisations.’ It’s likely that the most successful
projects won’t be those that promise an all-encompassing, enterprise-wide outcome, he added. ‘It is generally more manageable to structure digital projects in bite-sized chunks that can be achieved in a realistic timeframe, rather than trying to boil the ocean.’ Take this approach and its possible to
address end-to-end processes within a lab operation one at a time, however small a portion of overall workflow those processes are. ‘We could start looking at the beginning, or we could start in the middle,’ depending on where the major sticking points are,’ Curtis noted. Astrix’s approach is to help companies define their processes, then use its expertise and technology selection process – which over the years has encompassed potentially hundreds
of thousands of requirements – to understand those processes and define potential solutions. ‘Then we can also start working with the vendors themselves, to demonstrate how their product or platform can deliver against specified objectives.’
Beaten by complexity? Astrix is vendor-independent but, as Curtis pointed out, the company is frequently called in because a vendor hasn’t been able to deliver on a promise. ‘We carry out upwards of 200 projects a year, and more than half are rescue projects, perhaps because the vendor has started an implementation and realised that it’s a lot more complex than they thought, or the solution isn’t really addressing the finer details.’ And as technology becomes more ‘capable’, then the differentiation between acronym-led decisions, ‘Do we need a LIMS, ELN, SDMS?’ starts to disappear, he continued. ‘Companies shouldn’t just think about platform ‘names’.’ ‘Once there is an indication of how the
different steps can be digitised, and what that digitalisation will achieve, we can bring in the architectural elements, and look at the systems or platforms that might achieve that architecture, and how they can be used to improve and streamline
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