As healthcare budgets are squeezed ever tighter across the globe, many providers are looking to their laboratory services to deliver savings now. And it’s not just savings that are being sought, but faster results and better patient care as a result. As with so many other areas of healthcare, it seems likely that informatics offer the greatest potential for improvements in efficiency and in patient care. One company that believes that it has the expertise to help deliver return on investment to laboratories is LabVantage.
LabVantage has its headquarters in Bridgewater, New Jersey, and offices around the world. It offers a ‘comprehensive portfolio’ of products and services for laboratories, including laboratory information management systems (LIMS), electronic laboratory notebook (ELN) and business intelligence. It aims to help customers to ‘redefine and optimise the way their laboratories conduct business’. And boasts many satisfied customers to prove success, including healthcare providers, research institutions, and commercial enterprises.
Rich implementation history
The Berlin-Brandenburg Centre for Regenerative Therapies (BCRT) is a biomedical research partnership between one of Europe’s largest university clinics and Germany’s largest research association. Because it conducts medical research, the laboratory is subject to stringent regulatory requirements, and everything needs to be documented and traceable. Researchers therefore needed a comprehensive laboratory management system, that would allow them to track individual samples, and go through huge amounts of data, identifying the most important. The system also needed to be user-friendly, adaptable, and flexible.
LabVantage’s BioBanking System was chosen as the most suitable system. It provides full data management, and also allows samples, instruments, equipment and supplies to be comprehensively tracked. Based on a pilot involving three laboratories, BCRT now plans to roll out the system to the rest of its 25 laboratories.
The Copenhagen University Biobank for Experimental Research (CUBE) is a biobank which stores biological samples, both animal and human, from research projects across the University. These specimens are very high quality, and have huge potential to be used in future research. The Biobank was conceived as a way to bring together samples being held in several different departments and banks across the University, and provide a high quality resource to improve collaboration.
They chose LabVantage’s Biobanking Solution, part of their LIMS software, as a suitable off-the-peg system that provides plenty of adaptability and flexibility. The system was easily configured to match the organisational hierarchy, with three different types of user. It is also accessible from anywhere, allowing remote access for collaborators, guests and university users. The organisation is also pleased that it has the flexibility to expand to a full LIMS in due course if necessary, without having to replace this part of the system.
The Multiple Myeloma Research Consortium brings together academia and industry to research myeloma. Researchers are based in 11 academic institutions, working across three virtual cores. Perhaps most crucially for LabVantage, the MMRC has established a Tissue Bank, to provide a vital resource to researchers. Like BCRT, it is subject to stringent regulatory requirements, and also carries out its own quality assurance processes. It required a system that would span the life cycle of samples from collection through shipping and storage, to transfer to another researcher.
Again, LabVantage’s BioBanking System was chosen as the solution that offered user-friendliness, reliability, easy access and all the necessary functionality. Its introduction has streamlined processes and removing a huge tracking burden from the organisation. The system is also future-proof, as far as possible.
And it’s not only healthcare systems that are taking advantage of LabVantage’s unique expertise. OMV Aktiengesellschaft is Austria’s biggest listed industrial company, and is an integrated oil and gas company. It has labs in Romania and Austria, thanks to taking over part of one of Romania’s key petrochemical companies. They have used LabVantage’s systems to bring about a common approach to data management across their laboratories, bringing together two legacy systems. The company is particularly pleased with the system’s reliability, ease of use and 24-hour access, which has hugely increased efficiency.
Continuing quest for high quality informatics
Laboratories round the world are increasingly finding that they need high quality informatics to enable them to manage their work. It doesn’t matter whether the laboratory is a biobank of tissue samples for high quality research, a commercial enterprise providing analytics in oil exploration, or a laboratory providing test results to multiple healthcare providers, they still need access to high quality systems for maximum efficiency. LabVantage is proving that laboratory management systems can provide competitive advantage, and enable labs to deliver real value to their owners and customers alike.