LIMS for Clinical Research

June 01, 2016

LIMS plays a key role in providing comprehensive laboratory and patient management functionality, essential for researchers and technicians dealing with clinical testing and molecular diagnostics. It assists in streamlining the laboratory operations such as storing the samples, recording patients' data, saving the test results over a period of time, outlining data audits etc, thereby increasing productivity.

Clinical research labs have been using Laboratory Information Management Systems (LIMS). However, the traditional LIMS systems are prohibitively expensive and do not allow sharing of data in real time. Therefore, there is a growing demand for a cost effective LIMS solution for the clinical industry, owing to globalization of R&D operations, lack of budgets, stringency of regulatory bodies towards data integrity, and the need for compatible platforms to share knowledge/data within an organization and with third parties. Cloud technology has emerged as a viable alternative. The SaaS based in-the-cloud LIMS offers commercial and academic institutions, a standardized approach for managing laboratory data globally.

Hosted LIMS has several advantages over the traditional systems:

• Easy data accessibility for labs located across multiple sites.
• A substantial decline in the total cost of ownership (TCO) as the IT infrastructure is provided by the LIMS vendor along with the maintenance and data backups.
• Easy data recovery in the event of natural, mechanical or man-made disasters.
• Extensive scalability that facilitates accommodation of the infrastructural needs as the operations scale up/down with time.
• Complimentary software upgrades with maintenance packages.
• Data encryption that ensures data safety and patient privacy, both of which are important concerns of the compliance requirements in the healthcare sector.
• Easy integration of patient data with PMRs and EHRs that helps ensuring one record per patient.
• Enables organizations to be compliant for HIPAA, 21 CFR Part 11, GxP etc.
• Agility in managing multiple projects simultaneously along with monitoring the CoC and maintaining audit trails.

Unlike a traditional on-site model, cloud based Clinical LIMS allows diagnostic labs to be more responsive to their business needs and achieve lower turnaround times in serving pharmaceuticals that rely heavily on the data supplied for drug development.

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