Why laboratories are afraid to change LIMS, and how to overcome fears

If you ask anyone at any lab what they think about changing LIMS, it’s likely they will look at you with horror as though you were the bogeyman crawling from underneath their bed. “No, why would we want to do that?”

Thoughts of changing LIMS do activate irrational fears in employees and lab owners. You ask them: the system you have now is inconvenient and buggy, isn’t it? Well, yes, they reluctantly admit, the current one is so-so. But…And then the monsters start to come out. “All vendors exaggerate.” “It works, it’s fine.” “We haven’t paid off the old one yet. We can’t afford a new one.” “Too nerve wracking, no thanks.” “Data will be lost.” “We’ll have to close for a month.” And the biggest baddest monster of them all: “The new LIMS will be just as terrible, at least we’re used to the old one!”

Grab your flashlight and hold your blanket tight, together let’s bravely peek under the bed. It might turn out there is nothing there to fear at all.

Cut Through the Empty Promises with a Candid Conversation

Labs have learned from bitter experience: a new system vendor will again make grand, if not vague, claims. They tell you about the functions in general terms, and then it turns out that nothing works as you need. It just doesn’t fit in with the peculiarities of your laboratory. And now you have to look for workarounds and adjust the system endlessly to your current needs.

That’s the problem that almost always surfaces when buying LIMS. The question is why.

The vendor is unfamiliar with the context of your lab. They don’t know your rules, the habits of your people, the number of interactions with customers, or their usual behavior. The problem is that these logistical issues are rarely discussed in negotiations with the LIMS vendor. People in the lab feel that telling outsiders the inner workings of your business is taboo. It seems indecent, and the competition might take advantage of it.

That’s how it usually turns out when the vendor just doesn’t have any specifics to focus on. They don’t know anything. So, the vendor just talks about the features of their LIMS in general terms, with no idea what you have or exactly what you might need. And the vendor will try to oversell a little bit for good measure– just to be sure they look perfect. And then, after sealing the deal the details are revealed: the product falls well short of its promised capabilities and the laboratory is left only with buyer’s remorse. What’s more: most LIMS vendors realize from the very beginning that this disappointment cannot be avoided.

What’s the right way?

When we talk about medicine, everyone understands perfectly that you should not hide symptoms from the doctor, or else they can’t cure your illness. Imagine that a patient is too embarrassed to undress and demonstrate what’s aching. Under such circumstances, even a savant would not be able to help. It’s much the same story with the LIMS vendor. If you can’t tell them in detail what you want, how you envision it, how you see the result, what it looks like in terms of labor, what you want to do yourself, and what you want to be done then don’t expect to be dazzled by the results. Vendors generalize and embellish because you don’t tell them the actual situation. If you realize this and talk to the vendor frankly and in detail, you have a chance to get a good idea of whether or not the vendor can meet your needs long before the actual implementation begins. You just have to phrase the question carefully and precisely to get a meaningful answer.

For example, if you ask, “Do you have quality control in your system?” – all vendors will say, “Of course we do.” But if you start to understand how this QC module is organized, you will see that it is not compatible with your method of QC. For example, there is no control based on patient results instead of control material.

Tell the vendor everything that bothers you. Don’t be afraid: it’s protected by secrecy and won’t make it to market. A vendor who talks about labs does not survive. Labs would soon realize that their information is not protected. That’s why vendors never do this. They care about privacy as much as you do.

Avoid Stress by Incentivizing Your Employees

Though few employees are happy with the LIMS they are currently using, the perspective of changing it seems much worse. Everyone remembers all too well how much effort it took to get anything to work in the first place. People are afraid of the labor and torment they will have to go through again.

When a laboratory considers the cost of implementing a LIMS, it usually only sees direct costs. When implementing, most of the costs will generally be indirect, consisting of the work that the staff will have to do to bring the system to life. The employees are the ones who will have to figure out how the business processes will work. They will have to do hard labor on a tight schedule, going home only to sleep, all on top of performing their regular duties. And after that is completed they’ll still have to adjust to an unfamiliar system. To achieve a normal result they’ll have to work twice as hard just to keep treading water. But what do they get out of it? Well, it’s likely no one will even thank them. All these costs are not taken into account in the project at all – they are invisible.

That is why employees are not eager to implement a new LIMS. It is much easier to say that the existing system is not so bad. It works somehow. Let’s not touch anything, otherwise we will have to once again go through the frustrating ordeal of starting over from scratch.

What’s the right way?

We must clearly understand that for people in the laboratory, switching to a new LIMS is a feat. And for a feat, people will always want a reward. There are different types of people: some prefer cash, while others want to have a medal hung around their neck. If you are at the point of changing LIMS you must realize that it will require effort from your personnel. Praise, celebrate, make the orders, put some money into the costs and people’s reluctance will disappear.

Streamline Your Data Structure

The third irrational, but understandable, fear labs have when changing LIMS is the fear of ghosts. No, your lab isn’t haunted, but the idea of data disappearing in the migration can be quite frightening.

Data is a unique entity in several regards. Firstly, it is very rare that we would transfer physical items without understanding how they will be used. With information though, it happens now and then. Secondly, if you share information, it doesn’t become less. Nothing but information has that kind of magic.

But this magic has a side effect. Data is not just numbers: it is, first of all, the structure of these numbers, and their relationship to each other. Therefore, as soon as you put data into another structure, some of the information is inevitably lost. Even manually it’s easy to drag and drop data from an old system into a new one. If data could just be so easily moved, however, then the new system would by default have the same data structure as the previous system. But then there would be no point in changing it. We’re changing the system precisely because we need a different organizational structure for our data. The old one didn’t allow us to do what we wanted to do. It’s not a question of processing that data, it’s a question of what data to store and how to link it to each other.

That means that you can’t simply drag and drop data. The process of data adaptation is a gigantic job. What if something important will be lost? What we are used to, what has always been at hand, suddenly becomes inaccessible. It can be daunting.

What’s the right way?

The shift to a new LIMS is a great time to think about how we use data in general. This analysis often reveals that we don’t use much of the data we collect. We may have had assumptions about how we would use info, but those assumptions are very rarely 100% correct. So, it turns out that in real life we don’t need everything we gather and store. It is a good idea to analyze your assumptions about LIMS at the time of implementation: what works and what doesn’t. This will help you formulate a more robust data model and migrate it more accurately.

Sometimes in negotiations with a vendor we make assumptions about what we will need, how we will need it, and what it looks like, all without understanding how exactly it will be implemented. For example, we assume that it’s very expensive to store data because we get billed for it all the time. In reality, data storage is now so much cheaper that you can simply store it in the cloud and neatly put all the data from the past LIMS there. If something gets lost in the transfer from the past LIMS, you just climb into the cloud and take the data from there. It removes the psychological hesitance to put information in the trash. Feeling sentimental about some old data and simply can’t bear to delete it? Put it in the cloud. And tell the vendor: I’m willing to buy your system if you’ll keep my data for five years for free. For the vendor, the cost of storage will be very small.

So, no more data ghosts. You can deal with this fear just by paying proper attention to a well thought-out and logical data structure.

Shutdown for Installation or Change on the Fly?

Moving to a new LIMS is like rebuilding a car engine on the fly. To do everything properly, the business should be stopped for a while. But this entails additional losses, including reputational ones. Some labs try to use times when everyone is celebrating (like Thanksgiving) to change LIMS, but that means people will have to break their backs installing the new system instead of eating turkey.

What’s the right way?

Some advanced manufacturers have experience implementing a new LIMS without stopping lab operations. This is expensive but possible. There are additional costs associated with switching to a new LIMS on the fly, but they can be added up and evaluated. And then there will be your choice. If you don’t want to stop your lab activities while migrating to a new LIMS, you will have to work in two LIMS at the same time for a while. Think of it in terms of road construction. When we repair a bridge on a major highway that can’t be stopped, we build a temporary bridge and detour traffic around while we make repairs. Calculate what would be cheaper: stopping for a while or building a temporary bridge. All of this is subject to management, analysis, and evaluation. Don’t close your eyes, but discuss, calculate, and evaluate every single aspect. When you understand all the risks and assess all the costs you will find your fears replaced by meaningful control over the situation.

Don’t Sacrifice Efficiency by Trying to Recoup Costs

In the minds of the owners and managers of the laboratory, it looks like this. At some point in the past, you spent several hundred thousand on the purchase of a license and the cost of implementation. This leads to the idea of fixed costs that must be recouped. First you pay, then you exploit. It is clear that the longer you operate, the better this investment is amortized.

But the problem is that it’s not just fixed costs. There are also variable costs, which are naturally much more difficult to predict. For instance,”you have to turn in a new COVID report,” which means you have to pay the vendor for it. It’s not on time, and it’s not what the lab is aiming for. You don’t know when you’re going to need the money, but you know it’s going to take a lot of it, and that it’s not up to you. That item cost is not predictive. Perhaps $3000 here, $800 there, you remember some of them but cannot make a full assessment and so don’t charge them to the LIMS cost of sales.

That is why it is so difficult to assess the economic effect of LIMS. As a result, the lab keeps feeling that they need to work on the old system a little longer to recoup the earlier investment.

What’s the right way?

You need to do a kind of reframing in your head and look at LIMS not only as a tool but also as a system-forming framework that helps the lab run its business.

LIMS captures your business processes at a certain level. If something has changed in the market, or if you have changed the structure of your work, you must accurately assess if your processes continue to be relevant to the situation. You have to assess how well adapted your business processes are to the current market by evaluating them from top to bottom. And that’s a big step towards making a decision: can we use the old, decent LIMS or should we buy a new one?

Deciding to shake things up despite the backdrop of apparent prosperity and growing sales is quite difficult and a bit counterintuitive for labs. First of all, why should we do it? And second, what if it turns out to be necessary to change everything? (you hear a monster go bump in the night). But closing your eyes and pulling the blanket over your head is not a winning strategy. It’s far better to open your eyes, carefully assess the situation, and act rationally.

To understand whether you need a new LIMS, you need to look at more than just whether the old one “paid for itself”. You need to look at how it’s impacting your business processes now. What’s missing? What do we need? What has changed in the marketplace? Do you have new competitors, or new models for communicating with the customer? How do physicians feel about blockchain and Web3? What role does GPT chat play in medicine? How does the FDA regulate LBT? When you closely observe the external environment and how critical changes are accumulating, there is a realization that something needs to change and that it should be analyzed in detail.

Laboratories that follow this advice may find that they can improve their operations. Periodic rethinking of processes is always beneficial, even if you end up realizing that you don’t need to change anything right now and your LIMS is meeting all of your needs.

Business processes are primary, the system is secondary – that’s what matters most.

Don’t Get Complacent, Demand Perfection

Let’s say you bought an expensive griddle at home, started frying pancakes on it, and realized they were sticking. Depending on your temperament, you’ll either curse and throw that skillet against the wall or just scrap it and forget about it. One thing is clear: you’re unlikely to use it again. Likewise, if a new lamp or analyzer doesn’t work in the lab, no one is going to wrap it in duct tape and continue to work with half-functional equipment. You will throw them away and buy new ones from another manufacturer.

But somehow that’s not the case with LIMS. The costs are too high. Even if the lab realizes right away at the implementation stage that it is poorly adapted to its workflow and that it doesn’t fit, too often people huff and puff, but tolerate this ugliness. They are afraid of the Big Bad Monster, that if they decide to change the system, spend time, and money, and go through this hassle again, the new system will still be no better.

From a business point of view, this approach does not lead to success. You suffer, you miss information, you incur high costs. This is bad not only for the owner, who does not get enough money but also for the employees. They’re probably not going to get any pay raises anytime soon. They will waste time on nonsense. The value of their competencies will be diluted. No one likes to do routine things like manual data entry. It wastes the physician’s time. They’ll say, I may be in agony, but I’m used to it. A patient comes in and I spend half my time tapping away on the computer.

The efficiency of any information system can be defined as the ratio of the amount of information actually used in making decisions to the amount of information manually entered into it. You may enter a piece of information once and use it many times – that’s good. Or it can be the other way around – and that’s bad. If you continue to labor over an inadequate system you have low information efficiency, dragging down your personal efficiency and the overall efficiency of the team. Everyone gets bogged down in routine, loses their sharpness, and starts to burn out. The only thing that can save a burned-out doctor is a trip to Miami with a loved one. But nothing can save a burned-out lab!

What’s the right way?

You should have zero tolerance for a system that doesn’t solve your problems. You must demand that the vendor meet your requirements not only at the time of implementation but throughout the entire life of the LIMS. A frying pan must always cook your food, not just for the week after you buy it. And you should spell out the terms of use so that any time your LIMS burns, you will discard it. This incentivizes the provider to do a better job because otherwise, they will lose the customer.

If, on the other hand, you sit in the arms of your old LIMS at all costs and are panic-stricken about changing it – you’re giving vendors a very bad signal. They realize that once they get their foot in your lab’s door they are in forever, and it’s impossible to smoke them out. This means they will do anything they can to get in, up to and including outright deception.

Is it profitable for the laboratory to grant the vendor such benefits? Not at all! On the contrary, it is great if the vendor is afraid of you all the time. If something goes wrong you just take a broom and chase him out the door. Seems logical but, for some reason, this strategy is not very common among laboratories.

Once you shine a light under the bed and see the monsters were in your imagination, things look a lot simpler. You evaluate the benefits you’ll get with the new LIMS, compare them to the cost of replacing it, and make your decision with your eyes open.

Some of the most qualified LIMS vendors can do this analysis work with you at no cost. They want you and will genuinely seek you out. Such free and empathetic consulting from a good vendor has value in its own right. The vendor has a lot of information unavailable to you. By immersing themselves in your processes with you, the vendor helps you expand your business horizons by offering a fresh perspective. Even if you decide to stay with your existing system, this collaborative analysis will give you a better sense of direction and where to go from here.

Speaking from personal experience, every 3-5 years there comes a point when the system needs to be tested for strength. Based on the results, you might keep the old LIMS, or maybe you will replace it with a new one.

But how do you know about it? What red flags clearly indicate that the system is outdated or that the market has moved on? That’s what a good vendor should be consulted about. They will be able to examine these red flags themselves and…

… modify their (your) LIMS so that you don’t have to install a new one too quickly.