LIMSWiki:Community information center

LIMSwiki is a collaborative wiki dedicated to the scientific community, featuring organized, documented, and up-to-date content regarding all aspects of laboratory informatics, bioinformatics, and health informatics. LIMSwiki also strives to maintain relevant knowledge about laboratory equipment as well as commercial and open-source software likely to be used in a laboratory setting. This also includes the vendors of such equipment and software.

The development and curation of LIMSwiki has closely followed this definition since its inception in early 2011. Yet given limited contributors and a rapidly changing technology atmosphere, it's been difficult to keep up with and produce content relevant to the industry. Despite these challenges, LIMSwiki remains an ambitious project dedicated to collating useful information about the growing industry and its players.

What follows is the list of recently completed, unfinished, scheduled, and planned initiatives to broaden the relevant scope of the wiki. The content within this portal will expand as more contributions are made and more help is requested for new and current initiatives.

LIMSwiki initiatives

Unfinished

High priority

• Just as we've done with the LIMS, LIS, and ELN vendors, we would like to research and update the CDMS and SDMS vendor entries with correct vendor and product information.

• Just as we've done with the LIMS, LIS, and ELN features, we would like to research the functionality of CDMSs and SDMSs and create the associated "feature" pages, just like the LIMS feature, LIS feature, and ELN feature pages.

• We need someone to help us troubleshoot problems with the {{LIMSwiki category}} and the {{Yesno}} templates. We've tried to figure out why they aren't rendering properly but we've failed miserably.

Normal priority

• We would like to update the LIS entry to include more information about the anatomical pathology LIS and its important role and differences from other standard LIS.

• We would like to research and update the current HIPAA article to include more relevant content.

Low priority

• We have a small list of dead open-source projects we wanted to include with our listing of active open-source projects, should someone want to investigate the idea of rebooting those dead projects.

• In early summer 2011 numerous laboratory product categories were erroneously entered into the wiki and later removed for not following standard LIMSwiki naming conventions. We need to re-add the deleted categories under the correct naming convention.

Scheduled

• We try to check account creation requests at least once every week or two.

• Once a month was update content on the LIMSforum and LIMS/LI annual top 50 page.

• Three times a year we review all our open-source project articles and update the latest version number for the software. This scheduled activity typically takes place in January, May, and September.

• Once a year we review all the URLs found in our software vendor pages and update them as needed due to vendor website changes.

Planned

• We would like to significantly expand the healthcare information technology (HIT) content of the wiki, including articles explaining healthcare concepts, system types like EMR and EHR, vendor listings, and vendor pages. Research and framework discussions are currently ongoing as of May 15, 2013.

• We are always looking to expand the broader base of informational articles on the core scientific and medical concepts that bring about the need for laboratory and health informatics tools. What is a titration plate? What is radiation oncology?

Completed

2013

28 May 2013: We completed research on the Office of the National Coordinator's (ONC's) certified health IT product list. The goal was to collect web information for each vendor, including what type of software was offered (EMR, EHR, etc.), what specialty it covered (if any), and whether or not public pricing information was available. As noted in "Planned," the hope is to develop practical vendor lists of active vendors of healthcare information technology.

12 May 2013: We completed the research and updating of the current LIS vendors in our system, including the research and creation of the LIS feature article.

20 April 2013: We completed the research and updating of the current ELN vendors in our system, including the research and creation of the ELN feature article.

05 April 2013: We completed the research and creation of the LIMSwiki informatics resource portal. The goal was to compile as many resources relating to scientific and healthcare informatics into one location so LIMSwiki readers and editors could benefit more from their research and editing efforts.