It is well established within the laboratory informatics community that integrating your lab instruments to your LIMS is an industry best practice.  The benefits one can realize through instrument integration include:

• Improving lab and technician efficiency
• Reducing sample turnaround time, increasing sample throughput
• Increasing researcher effectiveness (do more science)
• Increasing data quality through the elimination of transcription errors
• Increasing regulatory compliance and data integrity
• Improving user and stakeholder satisfaction

Many laboratory organizations, although cognizant of the benefits, end up putting off integrating their lab instruments into their LIMS.  This is often relegated to Phase 2 of the LIMS project, which often never gets kicked off, which is bad news.  If you are one of those labs that have not integrated your instruments to your LIMS, the good news is that you can now do so and realize those benefits.  

Of course, integrating your lab instruments to your LIMS and fully realizing the aforementioned benefits is not a trivial undertaking.  To help you on your instrument integration journey, we thought we’d leverage the experience and insight of our expert LIMS consulting staff. So, we asked them, “What piece of advice would you give to a lab organization that’s integrating its lab instruments to its LIMS?” 

Let’s see what they have to say…

Have you interfaced your instruments to your LIMS? If so, how did it go? Do you have any advice to share?