Picture this—it’s the day that the lab informatics system you’ve needed for years finally goes live. You hear the cheers, you see the smiles on everyone’s faces, there’s excitement from the end users to learn the new system, and your boss can see the value of the system you implemented. It’s a happy day. If...
STARLIMS PH has enabled CDC and other public health agencies to reduce test turnaround time, eliminate the manual data entry process, and increase the throughput for testing during the during the COVID-19 pandemic.
After 40 years our primary focus remains to provide laboratories with world-wide powerful and flexible software tools enabling them to compete in a highly competitive clinical diagnostics marketplace. Applying technology to create the most advanced—and most cost-effective—healthcare IT solutions continues to be our strategy as we introduce SoftBiobank™ to our Research Information Systems Suite.
As the nations of the world begin transitioning from flattening the curve to cautiously beginning to resume doing business, the focus is turning to how best to prevent a “second wave” - and in fact to operate over the long term in the face of potential similar pandemics. Experts tell us this may only be the beginning, and that the likelihood is that new zoonotic viruses will arise with increasing frequency as we continue to disrupt natural habitats to accommodate the ever-increasing human population.
There has been recent discussion of the lack of accuracy of COVID-19 tests - both virus (rRT-PCR), which has been widely regarded as “the gold standard”, and antibody assays. The issue with PCR is not with the methods themselves, but the degree of human error that creeps in due to the complexity of the workflow - including pre-analytical sample handling, which can account for up to 68% of errors according to a recent paper, with overall inaccuracies of up to 41%.
In this 2020 article published in Frontiers in Cell and Developmental Biology, D'Cruz et al. provide an overview of the current laboratory methods available to test for coronaviruses, with a focus on SARS-CoV-2, the virus responsible for COVID-19. After providing an introduction to COVID-19 and its virus, the authors discuss the most common methods—such as qRT-PCR, ELISA, and LFI—as well as emerging diagnostic methods involving isothermal nucleic acid amplification, CRISPR, and NGS. They conclude with several visuals comparing the methods and when they are used, and they emphasize the importance of these test methods (as well as laboratory preparedness) in addressing rapidly evolving viral infection scenarios.
This is a Rochester Institute of Technology (RIT) course that is released on the edX platform. The eight-week course is designed for students to learn how "to extract, analyze, and interpret data from patient health records, insurance claims, financial records, and more to tell a compelling and actionable story using health care data analytics." The course is free to take, with a Verified Certificate of completion available for $249. The course requires on average eight to 10 hours a week of effort. Access to the class begins June 15, 2020.
After 40 years our primary focus remains to provide laboratories with world-wide powerful and flexible software tools enabling them to compete in a highly competitive clinical diagnostics marketplace. Applying technology to create the most advanced—and most cost-effective—healthcare IT solutions continues to be our strategy as we introduce SoftBiobank™ to our Research Information Systems Suite. 
In this 2020 article published in Frontiers in Cell and Developmental Biology, D'Cruz et al. provide an overview of the current laboratory methods available to test for coronaviruses, with a focus on SARS-CoV-2, the virus responsible for COVID-19. After providing an introduction to COVID-19 and its virus, the authors discuss the most common methods—such as qRT-PCR, ELISA, and LFI—as well as emerging diagnostic methods involving isothermal nucleic acid amplification, CRISPR, and NGS. They conclude with several visuals comparing the methods and when they are used, and they emphasize the importance of these test methods (as well as laboratory preparedness) in addressing rapidly evolving viral infection scenarios.
This is a Rochester Institute of Technology (RIT) course that is released on the edX platform. The eight-week course is designed for students to learn how "to extract, analyze, and interpret data from patient health records, insurance claims, financial records, and more to tell a compelling and actionable story using health care data analytics." The course is free to take, with a Verified Certificate of completion available for $249. The course requires on average eight to 10 hours a week of effort. Access to the class begins June 15, 2020.
