Sunday 6 May 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.

A person would be hard-pressed to find a lab nowadays that doesn't use one of these systems. There is simply no way to be able to manage all of the data that lab workers have to deal with without a reliable and sophisticated software that was designed for the job. By supporting the many different functions that a lab carries out, software like this makes new methods of experimentation possible, and makes everything in a laboratory much easier.

Workflow is a big task that these programs are expected to take care of. There is also an incredible amount of data that goes into them which is used in a number of different ways. Depending on the type of lab, there are many other tasks that software like this might be used for.

The first systems like these were only for tracking samples because that is all that they were able to do. It is amazing to see how far the software has come, leading to the advanced versions of today. There is an immense amount of data that these systems have to go through in order to do everything that modern lab workers need them to.

If someone asks four scientists what they consider an information system for laboratories to be, they're likely to get four different answers. This is because a person's definition may vary depending on what kind of science they are in. Knowing what a scientist really means is important.

The different types of information management software sometimes are put into different categories, but all of them have served nearly identical functions over the years. Some systems are used more on the commercial and research side of things. Others are looking more on the forensic and clinical side, making their applications somewhat different.

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.

Back in the days when manual data entry was necessary, it was much easier to accidentally record a number wrong or for the records to be compromised than it is today. Removing this potential for error makes a big difference in securing the accurate results of an experiment or research study. It is amazing to think of the amount of money and time that was wasted due to a simple transcription error.




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