How are LIS upgrades affecting modern healthcare?

Well, they’re going far beyond laboratory interoperability of patient registration, orders, specimens, results, and reports. Impacted by many other systems in the health IT ecosystem, the use of LIS is growing beyond in-patient care to involve ambulatory care as well.

As Meaningful Use (MU) requirements evolve, CPOE and lab reporting are becoming required by MU 2 and laboratories are starting to attend to interfacing problems. These difficulties will continue to be met by the regulations of MU 3. The interoperability challenges of managing and synchronizing the test catalog across the network, mapping it correctly to LOINC, identifying patients across multiple client electronic medical records (EMRs), and reporting distribution across multiple systems are vital issues for the organization, compliance, and most importantly the patient’s safety.