An Ideal LIMS To Lead the Way

Let’s say you’re a lab in the U.S. Let’s also say you’re a Very Small Animal, and yet you are daring enough to attempt a Heffalump hunt, or at least you don’t want to be overshadowed by giants who dominate on the market. You strive to stay afloat and maximize your growth by achieving an adequate market share. So, you scratch between your ears and ask yourself: How the heck am I going to accomplish this?

The obvious variant is to gradually find your niche, figuring out the way to position yourself. However,  it is not possible to guess in advance what strategies will bring success. Every laboratory chooses from the same standardized tests as others. Top-300 tests are the basic assortment, though the heavyweights provide up to 10000 and there are little smart labs that have five but unique ones. There is not much room for maneuvering here. Sure, we still have Lab Developed Tests which don’t need registration, but with the FDA cracking down soon, you won’t find salvation here in the near future…

Choosing a LIMS becomes very important to any laboratory business of modest to medium size. On this path, laboratories do not always find the best fit in accordance with their goals. Here I will discuss the main factors to consider while searching for the Ideal LIMS that will put you on the forefront of the industry.

Let’s list these criteria.

To distinguish yourself, don’t take what everyone has

So, you are in the middle of the process of LIMS choosing. The decision-making process has never been a cakewalk. Everyone insists on their criteria of choice and has numerous ideas about what kind of LIMS your lab needs.

As a result of these differing perspectives, there is a risk that after thinking through the options, the purchasing group will vote conservatively and settle on one of the systems that most laboratories use. They may fall under the impression that the well-known system is universal and reliable, and thus it can serve various needs of their lab, whatever they may be.

Don’t fall for this trap! In buying a LIMS everybody has, you only get what everyone else has. Sure, in this case, the developer is big and won’t run away, and it has thousands of clients, and you have guarantees and service. But that’s not the best variant for your growth. Every LIMS ad text tells the system can adapt to any business process. In the real world, it is not always so. A well-known system may be nice and good, but it is not about changes, not about being agile and finding your unique processes. It does not bring any distinct advantage, and the goal of offering something unique can not be achieved.

The risk of not taking risks is often underestimated. If you want to build a better path forward don’t settle for the same old instruments everyone uses

Take a cloud system…

Managing servers may not be the main competency of the lab, but nonetheless it is necessary to manage them efficiently. Everyone has to do their own thing: some of us are in the business of drawing blood from a finger, while others are managing hardware. Not everyone realizes the fascinating fact that if you choose a cloud system, you are entrusting server management not to the LIMS guy, but to Microsoft or Amazon. Because these giants are the ones hosting it, they have excellent guarantees that the system runs smoothly. That doesn’t mean they never break, but it’s likely to have much better reliability than your on-premise system. That’s why I advise you not to deploy your system on-premise – unless, of course, you’re a Heffalamp yourself (but we’ve already agreed you’re not). Trust me, Microsoft will do a better job.

And then.

Imagine you bought a truck and now you have to use it every time, even if you have to haul a small parcel. That’s not at all what you want.

…but the one you can adjust yourself

All right, you say, fine, let’s have a cloud-based system. But it’s usually not that easy to change. What about individualization, personalization, and our ability to tweak a lot of settings? You know these cloud-based systems: if you want to make changes you have to run to the LIMS developer every time, then pay up, then wait, and then you discover you need something else, and you again wait and pay up. Even if they are super-responsive people who are happy to quickly satisfy all our wishes – still it will not happen at the speed with which we’d like it. Or we’ll have to pay triple the price. So what kind of leadership are we speaking about?

Flexibility. Yes, that’s right, flexibility is not usually a strong feature of cloud systems. But, remember, we’re talking about the ideal LIMS. And the ideal LIMS is a cloud system that gives you the ability to change something not in the code, but in the settings.

Your level of response to market signals and consumer needs depends on this ability to adjust something (not necessarily global things, for example the type of form on which the analysis result is displayed). If a cloud-based LIMS has an adaptable mechanism that allows you to make changes in the settings, that gives you a gigantic advantage. To do some customization internally is a perfect decision that drives you to the forefront.

Pay variable costs

All LIMS providers claim that their payment system is the clearest, but it usually takes up to ten pages of a contract, and you can’t figure it out without a dose of good bourbon. Ask yourself: what does your lab need? What will it need when it finally finds its unique advantage and starts to grow?

Like teenagers, labs grow in spurts, unevenly. For example, you install an instrument, first you use 10% of its capacity, then 15%, then 80%. At that point, you need to put in a second appliance, and when you do, the efficiency of the first one is temporarily reduced to 40%. You have cash gaps forming all the time. The best solution here is to move LIMS costs from fixed to variable.

This will allow your lab to be brave in making new decisions and to be more sustainable along the way.

Frankly speaking, LIMS costs are not just what you pay the developer. It’s everything you spend, including staff training. Also included in the costs are fatigue related mistakes made by people when using the LIMS, something hard to detect because of the reporting system. The ideal LIMS has a low cost of customization and change, flexible reporting, ever-increasing functionality, and high predictive power. With such a LIMS, you only make purchases when you already know exactly what you need and have calculated what your workload will be.

Take the LIMS that allows you to maximize capacity (and lowers TAT, if you want to)

We know short turnaround time is the holy grail for most labs. And yes, of course, the ideal LIMS provides you with it. But again there is a small problem: everyone strives for a short TAT, and everyone promises it. Concerning your progress, some other slogans would be more fresh and attractive. What about “on time, no matter how much you order”? The reality is that the time that elapses from submission to the time the physician will make a decision based on this data is usually much longer than what laboratories boast. In the vast majority of cases, the highest speed and the shortest TAT is just not a competitive advantage.

But maybe you should offer something to people that truly sets you apart (and, by the way, maximize your capacity). For the sake of progress!

Find the rare LIMS that provides communication with your customers…

You can barely find a LIMS that has truly thought out and developed customer interaction capabilities, even though it is very important. It’s not just about doctors, but also about patients.

It is almost always the doctor who decides where to do the tests. Therefore, the doctor is considered the customer. But the patient also has a vital interest in what is happening. If his blood was taken badly or if he got a doubtful result, rest assured: both the doctor and the patient will talk about you unkindly. Imagine the patient has given an unsuitable sample for analysis and only finds out about it when he or she comes to the doctor.

All the negative reactions are pushed onto the physician. “Well, Mr. Jones, you’ll have to take another day off work, go back to the lab, and they’ll put another hole in you”. The patient is surely not happy to hear that, and the doctor will not feel a tremendous amount of love for the lab, will they? And it’s not hard to guess what the physician says to herself at that moment: “Bloody idiots”, – at the very least.

If everything’s running smoothly, no one notices. The good stuff happens in the background. But the minute something goes wrong, it reflects poorly on you.

And it would be better for you and your customers if this communication is automatic and not time-consuming. No doctor likes to have to re-fill out the form to order a new test. No doctor likes to call the lab. They have enough on their plate. Calling the lab is always a hassle. The less they have to call, the better our chances of pleasing the client.

There are also competent patients, such as those with a long-standing chronic diagnosis who have a great deal of information about their disease. If the lab considers communication with these patients, it helps the physician to improve compliance – and, therefore, to stay compliant with the lab. Are you getting the point?

Unfortunately, most LIMS are run by fools who can’t communicate with anybody.

…and makes your lab staff happy

Another important question:

They will, if no screen is overloaded with information, and if any desired goal is achieved in a minimum number of clicks. But if they are forced to invent ways to get around what the system doesn’t afford they will not be pleased. Users of most laboratory systems are not entirely happy with the interface. It would be far more productive if the developer received and incorporated feedback directly from those who will be using the LIMS. Staff happiness determines their efficiency, turnover, and, at the end of the day, customer happiness.

Find a developer who has expertise in lab business

Your progress is not how much your customers pay for your test. It is what your tests are. Search for a developer who understands what the quality is, and who runs or has run a lab business themselves. Even if their LIMS is relatively new, be sure such a developer understands your needs better than the one lacking in experience. They have their hands full with equipment, supplies, and lab reports. They have a keen sense of weaknesses and potential threats, growth points, and hidden opportunities.

They help you to find your “gold mine”. They have a vision of how to grow from this point, and perhaps also some ideas about markets where no one has succeeded yet, and ways in which such untapped good customers can be fished out.

Ideally, this expertise would be performed by the ideal LIMS developer for the different laboratories that have purchased its system. The LIMS provider thus becomes a meeting point for laboratories that helps them “ride together”. “Friends,” they say to the LIMS users, “let’s collaborate and diversify so that you all can share spheres of influence and be allies, not competitors!” That cuts costs dramatically, and everyone wins. In such an environment, Heffalumps (I mean market giants) no longer seem so unattainable.

It’s just a matter of finding one.