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[[File:|right|300px]] Title: What are the alternatives to a laboratory information management system (LIMS)?

Author for citation: Shawn E. Douglas

License for content: Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International

Publication date: December 2023

To be sure, a LIMS is an investment for any sized laboratory, whether it's almost exclusively monetary (with some other organization doing a majority of the heavy lifting, as with a cloud-based solution) or some combination of monetary and in-house resource expenditure (as with a self-hosted solution located on-premises, whether that solution is a commercial proprietary offering or an open-source offering). Even an open-source LIMS still requires the lab to lean on an employee or third-party consultant to set up, configure, and maintain the software (or even modify the source code), as well as maintain the local IT infrastructure to support it. The open-source route may make sense for small, single labs with a couple of instruments, but the lack of regulatory-driven functionality like an audit trail in all but a few open-source LIMS (e.g., SENAITE) may significantly restrict the available options to such labs.

This brings up the point of what a lab typically sacrifices with LIMS alternatives such as paper notebooks, spreadsheets, and ERP solutions. These alternatives rarely address:

• regulatory need for ensuring analytical results haven't been maliciously or accidentally modified (such as with audit trails that clearly and properly maintain the metadata surrounding an inputted analytical or some other value, as well as any changes made to it)
• regulatory need for clearly and accurately indicating a wide variety of metadata about a given sample or analysis
• regulatory need for software tools like spreadsheets to be validated
• regulatory and internal need for data integrity beyond what audit trails provide
• regulatory and internal need for maintaining, archiving, and disposing of data and information for a designated period of time, whether it's paper or electronic
• regulatory and internal need for recorded values to be treated uniformly for all lab operations, using the same units, rounding rules, formulas, limits, etc.
• regulatory and internal need for security of proprietary lab data and information, including methods, analytical values, and associated reports
• internal need for accurate and timely analytical results that have been officially validated/approved (with that validation/approval getting properly documented)
• internal needs for more than one user to access, add, and modify lab data and information
• internal needs for more timely recording of analytical values from instruments