Laboratory Information Management Systems

Abstract

The Laboratory Information Management System (LIMS) is recognized as a powerful tool to improve laboratory data management and to report human health as well as veterinary public health. LIMS plays an essential role in public health surveillance, outbreak investigations, and pandemic preparedness. The chapter aims is to provide an overview of LIMS use in veterinary fields as well as to report 20 years of experience of a Veterinary Public Institute in working with LIMS, illustrating the features of the LIMS currently in use in the institute and highlighting the different aspects that should be considered when evaluating, choosing, and implementing a LIMS. In depth, the chapter illustrates how LIMS simplifies the accreditation path according to ISO IEC 17025 and the role in the epidemiology and veterinary public health. For this aspect, it is very important to collect clear data, and for this reason, a LIMS has to activate formal checks and controls on business rules. To facilitate this issue, an interconnection between LIMS and other applications (internal or external to laboratory) could be improved to allow automatic data exchange. At the same time, the unique data encoding at national/international level should be used.