Monday, February 16, 2009

Anatomic Pathology Laboratory Information Systems

In the course of consulting, I review Dice.com and in the process I learn much about technologies from the job descriptions. For example, a HL7 integration engineer needs to have experience with HL7 in order to design and implement the integration of Digital Pathology products with Anatomic Pathology Laboratory Information Systems (APLIS). Interesting... HL7 at http://www.hl7.org/ is the ANSI protocols for clinical and adminstrative health data, i.e. pharamacy, medical devices, imaging or insurance transactions. Basically, a XML protocol for interoperability between heterogeneous databases.

To find out more about APLIS, I read the Tuthill (2008) article on how to implement an anatomic pathology information system and the conversion of

"Approximately 2.5 million anatomic pathology cases and reports were taken from our legacy system and converted into electronic files in the CoPathPlus database."

So, this seems that APLIS is an ERP for laboratories that could be SOA\WEB 2.0 based. This link, http://www.health-infosys-dir.com/yphclis.asp, provides a listing of Laboratory Information Systems with associated web sites. As an example, Antek Healthware has a product LabDAQ at http://www.antekhealthware.com/products/labdaq/index.php that shows how LabDAQ is used as a middleware to collect results from lab analyzers that is fed into electronic medical records.

In the latest issue of LabMedicine at http://labmed.ascpjournals.org/content/current , the article by Berte (2009) states that

"All laboratory work takes place as a series of interconnected processes, from the time the test or examination is ordered by a clinician to the time the result report is available for patient diagnosis or treatment. These interconnected processes are known as the laboratory’s preanalytic, analytic, and post-analytic path of workflow."

Something to think about with interconnected processes and preanalytic, analytic and post-analytic paths in the workflows.

In addition to the above, it seems it is important to know clinical data, architecture, patient management systems, controlled medical vocabularies, DICOM, HL7 CDA, CCOW, IHE workflows, SNOMED. In addition, a basic understanding of HIPAA, identity management, auditing, and access control as well as experience with interface engines: CloverLeaf, OpenEngine, ConnectR, and BizTalk.

Thus, these job descriptions provide an invaluable tool for developing a mental map of the solutions and technologies in different problem domains.


References

Tuthill, M. (2008). Automating Anatomic Pathology. Health Management Technology. Retrieved on February 16, 2009 from http://www.healthmgttech.com/features/2008_march/0308_automating.aspx .

Berte, L. (2009). Technology Will Solve Our Problems...Not! Lab Medicine 40:75-76.

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