Mobile LIS Articles: Field Collection Workflows

A mobile LIS is the phone- and tablet-facing half of a laboratory information system — the part collectors, couriers, and draw-station staff use away from a workstation to scan specimens, capture patient identity, and record custody events that land straight in the lab’s workflow. The articles below cover how that half is run day to day, and how it connects back to the specimen tracking record the lab reviews and releases against.

Collections that happen outside the building are where identity and custody most often break down. A specimen drawn at a patient’s home, a client office, or a draw station has to arrive with the same evidence a bench-side draw carries: who collected it, when, against which requisition, and what happened to it between the draw and the receiving dock. Under CLIA, that record is the lab’s responsibility regardless of where the tube was filled. The LIMS IQ mobile web app installs to a phone or tablet home screen, uses the device camera for barcode scanning, and connects to the same LIS the lab runs on — so nothing is re-keyed on return.

What these mobile LIS articles cover

• Collector queues and routing — daily stops filtered by client, site, and date, split into STAT, fasting, morning, afternoon, evening, and completed tabs, with dispatcher pairing and self-assignment.
• Positive patient identification at the draw — patient photo, requisition detail, ordered panels, and required container icons on the collector’s screen before the tube is filled.
• Barcode chain of custody — scanning at each handoff so the custody trail from draw station to receiving dock is continuous rather than reconstructed afterwards.
• At-home and off-site logistics — routing, exception handling when a draw cannot happen, and the reschedule path back to the dispatcher.

Start with barcode chain of custody at draw stations for the custody mechanics, then at-home lab testing and mobile phlebotomy for the logistics side. For the product view of these workflows, see the phlebotomy software solution page. To see the collector queue configured against your own clients and draw sites, request a demo.