Textile manufacturing depends heavily on laboratory testing to both monitor production and help ensure product quality. That requires fast access to information and the ability to generate reports that are meaningful to management, production personnel, and customer support specialists. Through its workflow management, results management, audit trail, and regulatory support functionality, a LIMS system can provide the support textile companies need to streamline lab operations and make it easier to produce, manage, access, and utilize lab data and information while reducing labor costs. [Read More]

The need for better organization of laboratory operations is well known. While today’s selection of commercial laboratory information management systems (LIMS) is a good start to organizing and running a lab, these solutions are only geared toward the management of wet lab operations. Existing solutions are inefficient for data-intensive laboratory operations that require significant bioinformatic data analyses. Therefore, in labs already burdened with the inefficiencies caused by unlinked functional silos, current LIMS solutions do nothing to resolve inefficiencies, and worse, laboratory operations remain fragmented. [Read More]

CSols Inc., the premier informatics consultancy in North America, announces the addition of new Data and Analytics service offerings. Organizations can leverage CSols’s expertise within and beyond the laboratory to enhance their decision-making capabilities. [Read More]

Customer satisfaction continues to fall below the levels seen during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic. A recent study found that 53 percent of US consumers have cut spending after having a bad customer service experience with a company, and 60 percent said they would spend more with a company if they had a better customer relationship. Per the same study, businesses across the globe stand to lose nearly $4.7 trillion in revenue due to poor customer engagement. Customers should not settle for an automated chatbot, after-hours answering service, or sitting on hold for an hour listening to Kenny G. [Read More]

Astrix participated in the SCOPE Summit 2023 as a Corporate Sponsor. The conference took place from February 6 to 9, 2023 in Orlando, FL at the Rosen Shingle Creek hotel. It was four stimulating days of in-depth discussions. There were 28 different tracks, 3 plenary keynote sessions, special cross-department panels, and interactive breakout discussions. [Read More]

The laboratory informatics space has been challenged to create a functionally competent and technically advanced LIMS. R&D and QA/QC laboratories are trying to solve this complex problem. At this point, the AI-based model disrupts the old approach to LIMS and enables a configuration that is driven by the user and operates independently. OnQ Software has a special interview with Jonathan Gannoulis that focuses on the journey to releasing the QLIMS platform. [Read More]

ISO 15189 is an international standard, prepared the International Organization for Standardization (popularly referred to as ISO, which brings together a worldwide federation of national standardization bodies to formulate standards), that specifies requirements for competence and quality that are specific for medical laboratories to meet both the technical competence and management system requirements necessary for delivering consistent technically valid results. [Read More]

The management of diagnostic testing in veterinary pathology laboratories is complicated because of the multiple species/breeds that must be supported, on top of the fact that animals cannot tell you what is wrong with them to point you in the right direction! Luckily Autoscribe has been supporting veterinary laboratories for many years and so our Veterinary LIMS has evolved, with customer feedback, to include many extras to help them provide a fast, efficient service in this highly competitive market. [Read More]

From disparate pools of data and information to inefficiencies in using that disparate data and information, the academic cancer center wishing to operate more effectively while improving patient outcomes and enabling more impactful research must turn to well-implemented data management systems and integrations. The University of Rochester Medical Center's James P. Wilmot Cancer Institute (WCI) was no exception to this greater need, turning to developing a custom data management platform called Hyperion to meet their needs. In this 2022 paper published in PLOS Digital Health, key stakeholders of Hyperion at WCI present the background on cancer center data management, as well as their methods in developing and results in using Hyperion. They follow this with discussion of their results, concluding that "Hyperion has surmounted large challenges in working with healthcare data to merge, organize, validate, and package data for use in multiple applications" at WCI, while also "lowering the skill floor for interaction with and maintenance of the software, reducing costs, and encouraging user autonomy." They add that a similar such system, from their viewpoint, could provide similar benefits in other academic cancer centers.