Sunquest Information Systems is embarking on a project that has the potential to change the face of lab computing. It has signed a contract to provide lab computing support for all of the hospitals in the state of Queensland, Australia, which has a population of about 4.5 million people (see: Queensland Health partners with Sunquest for Laboratory Information System). Below is an excerpt from the press release:
The contemporary enterprise laboratory information system (LIS) and services will support improved care responsiveness, safety and healthcare outcomes for the millions of Queenslanders served by the state's 124 hospitals, 70 primary health centers and clinics, 17 aged care facilities and 33 extreme remote multi-purpose health services. Queensland Health performs more than 20,000 tests per day in 36 public pathology, forensic and scientific laboratories....The contract includes Sunquest's full end-to-end enterprise laboratory information system for all pathology disciplines including chemistry, hematology, microbiology, histopathology, cytology, blood transfusion and molecular....Sunquest demonstrates support for patient safety and communication with existing systems After being named Vendor of Choice from a field of seven vendors, ahead of the main contract Sunquest was required to create a working prototype to demonstrate key processes and achieve sign-off from a variety of stakeholders. The prototype, delivered in a prompt six weeks, successfully demonstrated interoperability with Queensland Health's existing systems showing Sunquest can meet Queensland's needs.
For the purposes of this note, I will refer to the Sunquest LIS that will provide lab computing in 124 hospitals and other facilities in Queensland as a "health system LIS" or HS-LIS. The press release refers to an "enterprise LIS" which I think is subject to misinterpretation because of the ambiguity of the term enterprise. This new contract strikes me as a potentially important step in the evolution of the classic LIS which has most often deployed in a single hospital or across several hospitals. We are now in the midst of an era with the emergence of huge health systems in the U.S., the leading one with 76 hospitals (see: Healthcare Fast Facts – Top 30 Largest Hospital Systems in America). It might make sense to me for some of these very large health systems to install a single LIS to support the labs functioning in all of the hospitals comprising the large health system.
I believe that many of these large health systems will be seeking in the future to establish multiple "laboratories of excellence" within the system as a means to insource sophisticated testing like genomic and molecular (see: Intermountain Precision Genomics to develop hereditary cancer gene panels). To my mind, this is a far superior policy to the dependence on external reference labs to provide esoteric testing. As these "laboratories of excellence" proliferate in the mega-health systems, it would also seem to make sense for the future to install a "health system LIS" or HS-LIS. This single LIS could then effeciently manage laboratory test ordering, specimen transport, and results reporting, such as will occur in the Queensland project, across all of the labs in the single health system. This will be particularly important with the adoption of digital pathology technology where slide preparation and scanning could take place in one processing lab but with the images transferred to the various surgical pathology specialists scattered in all of the hospitals in the system.
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