Home Town Newspaper Covers Data Innovations

Data innovations (DI) is a significant player in the lab software space. I have posted previous notes about the company. DI provides to the lab industry a comprehensive set of interfaces between LISs and analyzers. It also sells lab middleware, both under its own label as well as in the form of products sold by major in-vitro diagnostics (IVD) companies under their own labels. A recent article about the company by its home town newspaper, the Burlington Free Press, provides useful information (see: Data Innovations expands). Below is an excerpt from it with boldface emphasis mine:

Data Innovations' products, known as middleware, and services provide the link between a lab's analyzers and its information system. They interface with analyzers and with equipment for automation....Nearly 1,000 instruments, automation systems, and information systems are supported by Data Innovations' middleware....Data Innovations' products traditionally were designed for the reseller market and are sold to suppliers of analyzing instruments and to suppliers of laboratory information systems. Customers include McKesson, Roche Diagnostics, GE Healthcare and Ortho Clinical Diagnostics and many others. In March, GE Healthcare headquarters announced that it would provide Data Innovations products, along with GE services, to customers for instrument interfaces, replacing GE-developed modules. When Data Innovations acquired P.G.P. of Brussels, Belgium, in 2007, it added a related component that serves more than 1,200 direct customers....Forty employees in South Burlington staff departments of sales and marketing; software development, customer service; quality assurance regulatory and documentation; implementation consulting services; training; finance; human resources and a production department that builds and ships the company's systems...."Within the last few years, we have been developing and growing the [I]mplementation [C]onsulting [S]ervices. The ICS consultants combine their knowledge of our software and services with their knowledge of advanced laboratory workflow to make our customers' processes more efficient and therefore more profitable," [a company spokesperson] said.

This article contains three of the magical words in today's lab software industry: middleware, workflow, and consulting. I have made many references to middleware in previous notes. You can generally define this category of software as a product that is interposed between the LIS and a lab analyzer that serves as an interface but can also offer additional functionality. Hence the middleware label. For example, some middleware now serves as a rules engine that can process test results coming from the lab instrument.

In part because of the growing popularity of Lean/Six Sigma, the term workflow has taken on additional weight in the eyes of lab managers. An understanding of workflow implies the knowledge and ability to increase the efficiency of a lab and reduce costs. For example, the term appears consistently in press releases from Siemens Medical Diagnostics describing the value that the company brings to the table for customers.

Finally, a brief discussion about the role of lab software companies as consultants to lab managers. A number of LIS vendors and IVD manufacturers have attempted to recast one of their business units as lab consultants. One such example is Ortho Clinical Diagnostics' ValuMetrix Consulting Service. Some LIS vendors have had difficulty carving out a niche as paid consultants to their lab clients, partly because of the monthly support fees that the clients pay to such vendors for software support. It has been difficult for the vendors to differentiate between these paid-for software support services and consulting services that lie outside of these recurring payments. I suspect that the focus of Data Innovation's ICS unit will be, in part, the development and deployment of lab rules. I have posted a number of previous notes about such rules in the past. It may be relatively easy for the company to offer remunerative consultation services in this area, particularly when it is easy to demonstrate the payoff of rules deployment calibrated in staff reductions. Autoverification rules in particular hold such a promise.