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

• We are slowly working on updating all of the content of the listed informatics articles.

• We are creating a LIS questionnaire, similar to the LIMS questionnaire we made.

• 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

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

• We would like to research and post articles on approximately 85 topics and 20+ open-source software packages.

• After completing the LIS questionnaire, we would like to re-evaluate the LIMS feature and LIS feature lists, organizing them in similar fashion to the LIMS and LIS questionnaires

• After re-evaluating and updating LIMS and LIS feature lists, we would like to completely revise and update the LIMS feature and LIS feature tables for vendors in the system.

Low priority

• We want to inventory different makes and models of clinical instruments and include any necessary articles related to that task.

Oh hold

• 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

• Once a week (Mondays) we update the Article of the Week.

• Once every week or two we try to check account creation requests. (Last done December 1, 2014)

• Once a month we fact check Laboratory, Scientific, and Health Informatics Buyer's Guide vendor information. (Last done December 1, 2014)

• Once a month we update content on the LIMSforum and LIMS/LI forum posts page. (Last done December 1, 2014)

• Once a month we update the top 30 most popular pages list on the front page. (Last done December 1, 2014)

• 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. (Last done September 3, 2014)

• Three times a year we review and update our directory of conferences and trade shows. This scheduled activity typically takes place in January, May, and September. (Last done September 4, 2014)

• Twice a year we research and add new commercial and open-source software vendors/items discovered via the Internet. This scheduled activity typically takes place in April and October. (Last done October 2014)

• Once a year we review all the URLs found in our software vendor pages and update them as needed due to vendor website changes. (Last done September 2014)

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 October 8, 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?

• We have a list of open-source scientific software, mostly for sequencing, proteomics, and microarray data management. We're still debating how to present that information. The list is so huge it's tough to justify creating an article for each piece of software.

Completed

2014

May 2014: Researched and added numerous LIMS, LIS, and ELN vendors as well as new open-source software offerings.

14 May 2014: Published the white paper "The Practical Guide to the U.S. Physician Office Laboratory."

April 2014: Researched and added numerous entries about the medical knowledge and health care sectors.

07 April 2014: Created a LIMS and laboratory informatics questionnaire for labs to better determine if a specific vendor/product meets their requirements in the form of a request for information (RFI).

2013

04 November 2013: Updated the health informatics article to include more relevant and non-Wikipedia content.

23 October 2013: Added the MediaWiki training guides, including practice exercises.

08 October 2013: Added the LIMSforum and LIMS/LI annual top 50 listing.

01 October 2013: We completed our annual review of commercial software vendor records and updated URLs that have changed due to vendor website changes. We also completed our annual research and addition of new commercial and open-source software vendors/items found via the Internet.

September 2013: Researched and added records/content like public health laboratory, clinical laboratory, laboratory, information, software as a service, and hospital information system.

13 September 2013: Added the Laboratory, Scientific, and Health Informatics Buyer's Guide.

04 June 2013: Researched and added records for clinical pathology and anatomical pathology.

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.