A Major Hospital Center Upgrades Laboratory Information Management System

To meet legislative requirements for digitizing patient hospital and medical records, a Hospital Centre chose to install an advanced new Laboratory Information Management System (LIMS).

A major healthcare facility in France, has three main hospitals, 15 remote test and research laboratories, clinics and schools. The new LIMS is a state-of-the-art software designed to provide laboratory practice compliance, data and operation traceability, confidentiality of patient records, and to speed-up the process of delivering laboratory test results over the network.

A crucial part of the process was integrating blood analysis results with the new LIMS. The hospital has approximately 40 blood analyzers from multiple vendors located in different laboratories that needed to be connected locally and remotely to the network. Using PCs was not feasible for a number of reasons, including space restrictions; contamination of sterile lab environments from the airflow of the PC cooling fans; potential for damage to PCs from power fluctuations; and cabling costs.

A more efficient and cost-effective solution was installing device servers to provide connectivity between the serial ports on the blood analyzers and the network. This was an effective means to enable the transmission of blood analysis data to the new LIMS.

After a thorough analysis of available solutions, the Hospital Centre chose the IOLAN DS1 Device Server from Perle. Perle responded quickly to our request for testing and we were quickly able to observe that this equipment answered our expectations perfectly, explains a Chemical Laboratory Engineer. Not only was it one of the rare single-port models on the market, an IOLAN DS1 could easily be placed next to each blood analyzer, saving extensive cabling costs. Using one terminal server for each blood analyzer provides network redundancy and assures uptime. Also, the compact design was well-suited for field use because it can be screwed or anchored to a wall or pillar in order to protect the connections and improve reliability.

The IOLAN-DS1 offered a number of advantages that PCs could not:

• Space savings – The IOLAN is very compact.
• No contamination – The IOLAN has no cooling fans that could compromise the sterile environment.
• Surge protection – 15 Kv ESD surge protection is a standard feature on all Perle terminal servers to protect units from electrical damage.