User:Shawndouglas/sandbox/sublevel4

The hospital lab is a unique creature in that it encompasses many departments within a hospital, often spread out over multiple areas. Most of the prior mentioned specialties, as well as many more, will make up the bulk of laboratory testing in a hospital.^[1] By extension, the informatics solution used in the hospital must be equally robust. This means the LIMS should be sufficiently feature-rich to allow for pathology, hematology, microbiology, virology, molecular diagnostic and blood banking workflows (to name a few) to be readily implemented. Just about any type of specimen you could imagine may be taken^[1], so the LIMS should have vast flexibility in its specimen types. Additionally, given the multiple departments and high daily specimen load of a hospital[1], the LIMS should be automation-friendly and support a wide array of instruments and equipment.

All this culminates into multiple points:

The hospital LIMS should have not only the essential clinical diagnostic functionality mentioned in the second chapter, but also most of the specialized functionality mentioned with the other laboratory types above.
The hospital LIMS should have the potential to take the place of the multiple informatics systems that typically run within a hospital lab, reducing data silos and minimizing the impact of system updates.
The hospital LIMS should have robust integration capabilities with EHRs and any other informatics systems that can’t be replaced by the LIMS.
The hospital LIMS should be highly flexible and configurable to take advantage of new test types, new departments, and more rapid testing (e.g., point-of-care testing).