Template:COVID-19 Testing, Reporting, and Information Management in the Laboratory/Workflow and information management for COVID-19 (and other respiratory diseases)/Additional benefits and challenges of informatics in disease testing and public health

3.3 Additional benefits and challenges of laboratory informatics in disease testing and public health

COVID-19 is at the forefront of the consciousness of humanity, by and large, and the informatics tools we implement for managing, treating, and surveilling the disease are of great import. From disease databases to electronic health records, from bioinformatics tools for peptide and protein modeling to laboratory tools such as LIMS and LIS, we continue to fight back against the threat of the SARS-CoV-2 virus. Yet despite the gravity of the pandemic, this is neither the first nor the last time laboratory and scientific informatics will play a positive role in testing for disease and improving public health outcomes.

Health informatics technology, when used responsibly, has already proven to be useful in studying and treating contagious diseases. In a 2013 research paper published in the journal BMJ Quality & Safety, El-Kareh et al. analyzed and described the state of diagnostic health information technology (HIT). They noted that without the aid of HIT, clinicians are more error-prone, leaving them "vulnerable to fallible human memory, variable disease presentation, clinical processes plagued by communication lapses, and a series of well-documented ‘heuristics,’ biases, and disease-specific pitfalls." Appropriate, well-designed HIT systems are capable of helping clinicians and laboratorians by providing more timely access to information, improved communication, better clinical reasoning and decision making, and improved workflows, as well as a reduction in diagnostic errors, and, as a result, improved patient safety and health outcomes.

From a public health perspective, the application of informatics to disease surveillance, reporting, and health habit promotion is also vital. Winters-Miner et al. note in particular the value of using informatics tools and methods to implement predictive analytics and data mining into public health. They use disease prevention and biosurveillance as major examples. We could, for example "analyze large populations of people to quantify risks related to public health, and help physicians to develop intervention programs for those patients at highest risk of some ailment or medical condition." Additionally, through the use of syndromic surveillance systems (tools aiding in the detection of indicators leading up to disease diagnosis for individuals and populations), they suggest that outbreaks can be better detected at local and national levels, and public health measures can be better implemented, increasing public awareness and hindering the spread of disease.

In the clinical laboratory, informatics systems have been influencing workflow improvements and improved service delivery for more than five decades. And while improvements have been seen in the laboratory from not only the introduction of computerized systems but also the realization of quality control and point-of-care testing, more challenges remain. For example, quality management in the laboratory is still often a manual, time-consuming activity. While the LIMS and LIS have some tools to assist with this task, the inclusion of laboratory analytics and business intelligence tools into those systems may lead to even further improvements in quality and efficiency in the lab. And in the realm of point-of-care testing, oversight and control of instruments can be lost when connectivity and training is lacking. Proper interfacing of these lab instruments could lead to improvements in those areas, says Siemens Healthineers' Daniel Gundler. "Maintaining POC instruments and overseeing the operators performing POC tests would be much easier if all the information and data from each instrument were accessible through one user interface in which coordinators could manage both the instruments and operators."

3.3.1 System interoperability

System interoperability also poses benefits and challenges to clinical disease testing and prevention. Interoperability is defined as “the ability of different information systems, devices and applications (‘systems’) to access, exchange, integrate and cooperatively use data in a coordinated manner” to ensure timely, portable information and improved health outcomes. Improving interoperability among clinical informatics systems is recognized as an important step towards improving health outcomes. The National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine had much to say on this topic in their 2015 publication Improving Diagnosis in Health Care:

Improved interoperability across different health care organizations—as well as across laboratory and radiology information systems—is critical to improving the diagnostic process. Challenges to interoperability include the inconsistent and slow adoption of standards, particularly among organizations that are not subject to EHR certification programs, as well as a lack of incentives, including a business model that generates revenue for health IT vendors via fees associated with transmitting and receiving data.

In particular, they discuss an additional concern, one that still causes issues today: interfaces between electronic health records (EHR) and the laboratory and other clinical information systems that feed medical diagnostic information into the EHRs:

Additionally, the interface between EHRs and laboratory and radiology information systems typically has limited clinical information, and the lack of sufficiently detailed information makes it difficult for a pathologist or radiologist to determine the proper context for interpreting findings or to decide whether diagnostic testing is appropriate. For example, one study found that important non-oncological conditions (such as Crohn’s disease, human immunodeficiency virus, and diabetes) were not mentioned in 59 percent of radiology orders and the presence of cancer was not mentioned in 8 percent of orders, demonstrating that the complete patient context is not getting received. Insufficient clinical information can be problematic as radiologists and pathologists often use this information to inform their interpretations of diagnostic testing results and suggestions for next steps. In addition, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s Clinical Laboratory Improvement Advisory Committee (CLIAC) expressed concern over the patient safety risks regarding the interoperability of laboratory data and display discrepancies in EHRs. They recommended that laboratory health care professionals collaborate with other stakeholders to “develop effective solutions to reduce identified patient safety risks in and improve the safety of EHR systems” regarding laboratory data.

In fact, interoperability issues have come up during the global laboratory response to the COVID-19 pandemic. In early April 2020, a report from Nature revealed that academic research laboratories wanting to assist with COVID-19 testing efforts have at times been stymied by the incompatibility between academic informatics systems and hospital EHRs. Not only do hospitals use EHRs of differing types, but many of those EHRs were not designed to talk to other EHRs, let alone to academic and research laboratories' informatics systems. Combine this with strict account procedures and the costs of developing interfaces on-the-fly, more than a few medical systems have turned away the offer of help from academic and research labs. As it turns out, HL7- and other standard-based interfaces have long been expensive for many vendors to implement, the cost justified typically when high volumes of samples are involved. Additionally, in more normal, non-pandemic circumstances, the requirement to interface with EHRs and hospital information systems (HIS) is almost exclusively found in the LIS and LIMS used in patient settings, i.e., in the hospitals, medical offices, and laboratories catering to diagnosing disease in patients. Academic labs have not been equipped at any level (software, hardware, or personnel) to do high volume clinical testing, nor have they had reason to ensure their informatics systems can interface with clinical systems.

Interoperability benefits and challenges show up elsewhere too. Take for example the value of phenotypes, a representation of the genetic analysis of the collective observable traits of an organism, traits caused by the interaction of its genome with the environment. The value of patient phenotyping data is increasingly useful in the fight against known and novel viruses, as well as a broad variety of non-viral diseases. As Ausiello and Shaw note, in order for medicine to advance and produce improved patient outcomes, "traditional clinical information must be combined with genetic data and non-traditional phenotypes and analyzed in a manner that yields actionable insights into disease diagnosis, prevention, or treatment." Whether it's identifying "the measurable phenotypic characteristics of patients that are most predictive of individual variation" in treatment outcomes for chronic pain or COVID-19, phenotypes have utility in the clinical sector.

Here again interoperability between EHRs and laboratory informatics systems comes into play. In a 2019 paper published by Zhang et al. in nph Digital Medicine, the topic of extracting patient phenotypes from laboratory test results fed into EHRs is addressed. The authors state that one of the more difficult aspects of their research is that while "[l]aboratory tests have broad applicability for translational research ... EHR-based research using laboratory data have been challenging because of their diversity and the lack of standardization of reporting laboratory test results." They add:

Despite the great potential of EHR data, patient phenotyping from EHRs is still challenging because the phenotype information is distributed in many EHR locations (laboratories, notes, problem lists, imaging data, etc.) and since EHRs have vastly different structures across sites. This lack of integration represents a substantial barrier to widespread use of EHR data in translational research.

The answer to the clinical and laboratory interoperability question is unclear. A 2019 article in the American Association for Clinical Chemistry's CLN Stat addressed remaining roadblocks, including lack of standards development, data quality issues, clinical data matching, lack of incentivizing health IT optimization, text-based reporting formats, differences in terminology, and HL7 messaging issues. They add that proposals from the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology (ONC) and the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services include possible fixes such as standardized application programming interfaces (API). They also note that middleware may pick up the slack in connecting more laboratory devices, rather than depending on the LIS to handle all the interfacing.

Even so, it remains obvious that more work needs to be done in the development and standard use of clinical and laboratory informatics applications if the promise of personalized medicine and the need for improved disease testing and response are to be fulfilled. In particular, how we responsibly protect personal health information while putting its anonymized variants to beneficial use for disease testing and prevention remains a critical question that must be solved in order to better prepare for the next COVID-19.