Written by Sonia Munir,
Ask a lab director why they started looking for a new LIS, and there’s usually a story behind it. Maybe the vendor said it would stop supporting the product. Maybe a merger left the group with three practices on three separate systems. Molecular testing has pushed some labs into a search, while others just have pathologists who are sick of signing out cases in one window and looking at slides in another.
Nobody’s in a hurry once the search starts, because the winner may stick around for ten years or so. Labs go about it differently, though a few steps show up almost every time.
Start With the Committee
IT can tell you plenty about security and interfaces, but it may not notice that a system makes block tracking harder for histology. A business office focused on price can miss just as much, which is why labs tend to pull people from several departments early on.
You’ll usually see a director or operations lead on the committee and a pathologist who signs out a lot of cases. Add the histology supervisor, someone from billing, and someone from IT. They won’t agree on everything. A pathologist trying to get through a worklist has very different concerns than a biller who’s checking whether charges will drop correctly, and it’s better to hash those out during the evaluation than after go-live, when changes get expensive.
Follow a Case Through the Lab
Pick a recent case and walk it through accessioning, grossing, histology, sign-out, and billing. Plenty of labs do this before a vendor ever hears from them. It can be tedious. Still, it’s one of the easiest ways to find out where staff are typing the same information twice or keeping a spreadsheet because the current system falls short.
Those notes turn into a requirements list. Specialty support will probably be near the top, along with interfaces for the EHRs that referring physicians use. Once the list is in writing, it’s easier to stay grounded when a vendor shows off an impressive feature that nobody in the lab would use.
Think about the next few years while you’re at it. Will the group open more sites? Grow its outreach business? Start scanning slides? Any of those plans could change which system makes sense.
Build a Shortlist
Few labs have time to look at every LIS on the market, and specialty focus rules out a lot of them anyway. Plenty of systems started out in clinical labs that run large volumes of chemistry and hematology tests. They’re comfortable with numeric results but less so with anatomic pathology, where one case can involve several specimens, recuts, and special stains before the pathologist ever writes a narrative diagnosis. Pathology groups generally want software designed with those cases in mind.
Hosting usually comes up around the same time. More labs have moved to the cloud because they’d rather not maintain servers, and remote sign-out gets easier too. Some hospital-based labs just stay with the lab module in their enterprise EHR.
Then people start making calls. Lab directors know each other from conferences and professional groups, and many will ask a peer what they’re using and whether they like it. A good report from someone running a similar lab can get a vendor on the list pretty quickly.
Ask for Real Scenarios in the Demo
Product tours only show what the vendor wants you to see. Buyers who’ve been through this before show up with their own cases and make each vendor work through them from start to finish, using the same ones for everybody. A surgical case with multiple parts and add-on stains is a good test. So is an amended report or a rush specimen, and you’ll want at least one case where the charge has to go out with the right codes.
Seeing the same work in each system makes comparisons a lot easier. Count the clicks. Watch what happens with add-on stains and whether anyone has to resort to a workaround. If you can, get pathologists into the session and let them try the reporting tools, since they’ll be using them all day. It’s hard to win them over later if they don’t like signing out cases in the system.
Bring Up Digital Pathology
Labs with no plans to buy a scanner are asking about this now too. The LIS they choose could easily still be in place when they go digital, so they want to know what that move would involve.
One big question is where the slide images will be stored. Some setups keep them in a separate image management system and use an interface to match them with cases. Others keep the images and the case together in one LIS record. Labs have found that the separate route can add handoffs and make it harder to confirm that each slide is tied to the right patient. Many also ask if they can hold on to the scanners they own and add digital work in stages.
Call References and Read the Contract
Reference calls can settle a close race. Ask for customers around your lab’s size and in the same specialty, then find out how long implementation really took and what went wrong at go-live. How did support respond when something broke late on a Friday? Would they sign with the same vendor again?
The contract needs a careful read as well, because a low quote may not stay low. Check whether it covers implementation, interfaces, data migration, training, and support. You’ll also want to know how pricing changes as volume grows and what happens to your data if you ever leave.
Make the Call
It’s rare for one feature to decide the whole thing. Labs usually pick the provider that knows pathology and fits the way they work, as long as the system connects well with referring physicians and billing and the vendor has a realistic plan for what comes next.
A lot of independent pathology groups and reference labs end up looking at pathology-specific vendors for those reasons. NovoPath is one example, with a cloud-based LIS that has the digital pathology software built in. Every lab has its own priorities, of course, but a careful search now makes it less likely that it’ll be doing all this again in a few years.
Author’s Bio
Sonia Munir is a content writer at LinkTrixx, where she writes and edits articles for publishers and brands across a range of industries. She focuses on clear, well researched writing that is easy for readers to follow and trust.
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