LIS Software Blog: Guides for Clinical Labs

A laboratory information system is the software a lab runs on day to day — the system that receives orders, accessions specimens, drives instruments, holds results through review and verification, releases reports, and hands charges to billing. This section collects the practical articles behind those workflows. For a structured overview of what a clinical LIS does and how to evaluate one, start with the clinical LIS guide; the posts below go deeper on individual decisions.

Most of what separates one LIS from another is not the feature list — it is how the system behaves under real volume. Whether order messages from a referring EMR reconcile cleanly against your test catalog. Whether the rules engine releases routine results without a tech touching them, and routes only genuine exceptions to review. Whether a client can pull a report themselves in the evening instead of calling the lab. These articles work through those questions with the configuration detail a lab director or LIS analyst actually needs, grounded in CLIA-regulated practice.

Where to start in this section

• What an LIS is, in plain terms — the fundamentals: what the system does, who touches it, and how it differs from the EMR that sends it orders.
• HL7 integration — a practical guide to ORM, ORU, and ADT messaging, including interface engines, transport, and what actually breaks during an EMR go-live.
• Autoverification rules — how to design release rules that hold up under inspection: delta checks, critical values, reference-range gating, and the audit trail behind each automated release.
• Client portals — why portal ordering and self-service reporting deflect lab phone calls, and what a referring practice needs to see.
• Patient portals and the Cures Act — immediate result release and how to handle it without stranding patients with uncontextualized abnormal results.
• Molecular lab management — running PCR and NGS workflows inside a clinical LIS, from batch setup through result interpretation.

Related guides and platform pages

The topics above map onto specific parts of the platform: HL7 LIS integration, rules-based resulting and autoverification, accessioning, and the client and patient portals. For evaluation-stage reading, see the LIS buyer’s guide, LIS vs LIMS, and the cloud LIS software guide.

To see any of these workflows configured against your own test catalog and interfaces, request a demo.