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:
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.