LII:The Comprehensive Guide to Physician Office Laboratory Setup and Operation/Data management

Data management in the physician office laboratory (POL) involves understanding workflows, choosing data management systems (like LIS or ELN), and applying best practices. This chapter talks about the common workflow and how data associated with it is better managed with informatics tools.

This fourth chapter on the topic of data management has seven sections.

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4. Data Management

Functional requirements

When considering the data management requirements for any business — from a car dealership to a clinical laboratory — the workflow of the business should be one of the primary starting points. This holds equally true for the physician office laboratory (POL). As such it's important to note where the POL is located in the broad scope of clinical workflow, which is directly in the analytic stage of the process, with a few pre-analytic and post-analytic tasks occurring directly before and after. As a reminder, here's the POL workflow diagram again from part one of this guide:

Inside this workflow are several other activities:

1. Specimen collection: The physician, nurse, or office assistant will go through the necessary procedures to collect what is needed for an ordered test. Some specimens such as intravenous blood and urine will require added collection procedures beyond easy-to-collect specimen types such as capillary blood.
2. Specimen receiving: In most cases the specimen doesn't require special transportation because collection is happening at the point of care. Additionally, the specimen may not require much handling, as in the case of collecting capillary blood from the finger bed for a determination of glucose levels via a hand-held meter. More complex samples not tested at the patient's side will require extra receiving procedures, however, including adding labeling and barcoding as well as entering the specimen in a data management system.
3. Specimen preparation
4. Aliquot
5. Specimen processing and analysis
6. Post-processing
7. Reporting

The full LIS requirements questionnaire is included as an addendum to this guide. You can access it directly here or in the Additional Resources section of the guide.