August 2022—Just as there is scant room in this world for pink “While You Were Out” notepads, paper checks, or the copying skills of Bartleby the Scrivener, laboratories would do well to leave manual result verification in the past.
Read More »Close ties: instruments, middleware, and more
July 2021—Laboratory instrumentation from an IT perspective and as one solution to the labor shortage were the topics explored April 27 in a virtual roundtable of instrument vendors and laboratory medical directors, led by CAP TODAY publisher Bob McGonnagle. Part one of their conversation about core labs was published in the June 2021 issue; part two follows.
Read More »SARS-CoV-2 testing: Buy, build, and borrow? Middleware solutions
April 2021—Whirlwind timelines, novel problems, and a never-ending workload: On the anniversary of the COVID-19 pandemic, pathology informatics leaders David S. McClintock, MD, and Christopher Williams, MD, reflected on the year’s onslaught of challenges.
Read More »Beyond connectivity: middleware’s shifting shape
April 2016—Middleware was always about connectivity. But when it emerged on the scene some 20 years ago, connectivity involved basically one mandate: getting laboratory instruments to talk electronically to a hospital’s laboratory information system, accept orders, and deliver results to the right shelves in the LIS warehouse.
Read More »Broadening the productivity spectrum with middleware
March 2016—As James Beck, MT(ASCP), remembers it, middleware was introduced at his institution about the same time that the nursing department decided connectivity should be the province of the laboratory. When the concept of docking and interfacing glucose testing devices came on the scene around the turn of the millennium, that was a turning point, says Beck, who is point-of-care testing coordinator for the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center–St. Margaret, which uses the Telcor middleware solution QML.
Read More »Interface validation: abort, retry, succeed
February 2015—When you go looking for problems, you’re bound to find them. That truism is especially pertinent in the arena of interface validation, as the team at New York’s North Shore-LIJ Health System discovered recently. The laboratory professionals there were charged with helping to implement the first phase of a joint venture with New York City’s Health and Hospitals Corp. (HHC), in which North Shore-LIJ would serve as the massive public health system’s primary reference lab.
Read More »