What is laboratory equipment integration ?
Laboratory equipment integration is a way to connect your laboratory equipment with the system for report automation. Equipment integration can help you to reduce the time and error to generate report.
After the integration you will be able to transfer data from machine to computer without any writing. But for that you must establish a connection between the computer and equipment.
How to integrate laboratory equipment with LIS (Laboratory Information System)
Medical Equipment Integration with Laboratory Information And Management Systems (LIMS). Well as you know making laboratory report manually takes time and if you entered any wrong value it could cost someone life. We provide automatic report generation with laboratory equipment Integration. So then you can get report in seconds and results will be accurate.
There are many device that can be integrate with Laboratory Information System but for Integration we must need device support for that. And how do we know whether or not device support the integration well by It’s specification.
Connectivity
Transfer data from any machine to your computer first we required connectivity between your computer and the machine. Now you need to check machine manuals to find our what type of connection machine support like new healthcare equipment support lan and rs232 connectivity type.
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Ethernet Connection: Connect machine with lan cable directly with your system or through wifi. Available in most of the big equipment.
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Serial Connection (RS232): Connect your equipment with RS232 cable directly to your computer. You can use USB connector if you don’t have rs232 port in your system.
Communication protocol
2. Serial: Rs232 and usb cable communicate through serial port communication. To find a connected port you can use device manager.
Once you are connected with the machine it’s best to test connection before start writing code. Most of the machine comes with software to get data from machine. Try to use that software first to check your connectivity with the machine. If you don’t have any software then just try to establish a communication with the machine as per the connectivity. There are mainly two types of communication protocol tcp and serial port communication.
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TCP/IP: Send and receive data from a particular ip address with port. In your machine you can find out ip address on screen. If you are not able to locate ip address by machine just remove the cable from machine then use command prompt to list out the ip address connected with your network now connect the machine and do the same the new ip address will be your machine.
Communication Language
You can communicate with any programming language that support tcp/ip and serial communication protocol. You just need to develop a communication program which can send and receive data from the machine. Below are the common programming languages use for tcp/ip and secial communication.
- Java
- .net
- TCP/IP
- Serial Communication
Transferring Information Between Clinical Laboratory Instruments and Laboratory Information & Management System
How to communicate through ASTM Format?
You need integration guide to communicate with your machine in ASTM format. The guide mostly provided by the equipment manufacture. There is a specific instruction set to get data from the machine.
For transferring data from laboratory equipment to information system you need to communicate with the equipment. Most of the medical equipment use ASTM format to communicate with the laboratory information system. This is where most peoples get stuck.
What is ASTM Format
Astm full form is American Society for Testing and Materials. ASTM Committee E31 Healthcare Informatics decided to restructure their operation and introduced nine standards (formerly ASTM E792; E1029; E1238; E1246; E1381; E1394; E1466; E1639; and E2118) were redesignated as NCCLS standards LIS1 through LIS9. LIS2 is a revision of the former ASTM E1394-97.
ASTM format is communication language to read and write data from machine to software.