Sunday, May 6, 2018

Understanding What LIMS Stands For

By Karen Smith


The main thing to understand when learning about this kind of thing is what the letters stand for. LIMS is a laboratory information management system. There are other cases in which it might be called a laboratory information system, abbreviated as LIS, or a laboratory management system, LMS, but they all refer to basically the same thing.

The main thing to know about these types of systems is that they are always computer-based nowadays, since they are a type of software. Every day, labs have many different forms of data and other information that needs to be tracked in real time and kept in a safe, reliable way that the scientists know will be accurate every time. Not only does this enable researchers to perform experiments in studies like they never could before, but it also makes every function of the lab much easier.

This kind of system is absolutely necessary just to track a lab's complicated workflow. Every piece of data that gets recorded in a lab is also highly important. Modern scientists will only trust this job to sophisticated software like this.

Management systems have been around in many different forms over the years, but as science has become more advanced, so too have these systems. In the beginning, they were just used to track samples and not much else. Nowadays, the systems are used as highly advanced programs that can put huge amounts of data together at speeds people of yesteryear could only dream of.

It is necessary to get to know any given laboratory and the workers there to know what they really mean when they refer to a laboratory information management system. This is often dependent on what kind of studies they are doing in their labs. Knowing this is a big help in understanding why they think of these systems in the way that they do.

There are a number of different categories that these systems are put in, but it is easy to see that the main purposes remain the same across all of them. The specific needs of some labs have led to some that have special tools to look at commercial and research aspects. Others are mainly for the clinical and forensic side of things.

As laboratory sciences have grown more advanced, the uses of information management systems have grown immensely since they were first used. One of the big ways it helps researchers is by bringing together the different core branches of science. Some of the ways that these systems' uses have become more advanced have caused the different types to become more similar in use.

Entering information manually can often seem like a hassle, but it is hard for the average person to even imagine how difficult it was in laboratories before this automated software existed. Beyond just plain annoying to have to do (and a literal pain for those scientists whose hands cramped up from how much writing they had to do on a daily basis), it also endangered the success of studies because of simple transcription errors. It is much harder to have incorrectly recorded data with this kind of a system.




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