Lab analyser connectivity
A new analyser is supported in 15 minutes, without touching your PCLISBridge is a small desktop application that sits between the machines in your lab and the software you run the lab on. The analyser finishes, the result appears on the patient’s report. It works with any hospital system or LIMS, it keeps working when the internet does not, and we supply and support it for you.
What it replaces
It is the most ordinary error in a diagnostic lab and the hardest one to catch, because the number on the report looks exactly as authoritative whether it was measured or mistyped. A transposed digit in a creatinine is not visible to anyone downstream.
LISBridge removes the keyboard from that step. It installs on an ordinary PC in the lab, sits in the system tray, and listens to the analysers on the bench. When a machine finishes a sample, the result is read, checked, and handed to your hospital system against the right patient. Nobody retypes anything, and the report is ready sooner because nobody is waiting for a free moment to do the typing.
The analyser finishes and the result is already on the report. That is the whole product.
How it is put together
There is no appliance to rack and no box to buy. The analysers reach the lab PC over the cable they already have, or over the network. LISBridge reads what they send and forwards it to your server over plain HTTP, on your own network.
An analyser announces itself the first time it sends anything, so the list of machines in the lab builds itself rather than being typed in. If several PCs in a large lab need to do this at once, they can share one database and behave as a single installation.
When the line drops
The licence is signed and checked on the machine itself, against a key the application already holds. There is no call home to authorise a day’s work. A site with no connection at all keeps bridging results between the bench and its own server indefinitely.
The one thing that needs the internet is activating a new installation, and that is a single round trip. Afterwards, the checks that do run fail quietly: a missed licence check or a missed parser update changes nothing about the lab’s day.
Quality control
Analysers do not announce which of their messages are clinical. Morning controls, calibrations and patient samples come down the same wire in the same format, and middleware that cannot tell them apart either floods the hospital system with control values or relies on somebody configuring rules correctly.
LISBridge classifies each message as it arrives. Control and calibration runs are recorded on their own screen for the lab to review, and are never written to a patient record or passed to your hospital system. A batch containing both is split correctly rather than rejected.
To be exact about the limit: the quality-control screen is a record of runs with control, lot, level, target mean and standard deviation. It is not a statistics package, and there are no Levey-Jennings charts or Westgard rules in it.
Reaching the machine
Older instruments speak down a serial cable, newer ones over the network, and a few will only write a file to a folder. All three are ordinary here.
The cable already coming out of the back of the analyser. Pick the port and the baud rate and it listens.
It can wait on a port for the analyser to connect, or dial out to the machine and reconnect by itself if the link drops.
For analysers that write a file instead of talking. It watches the folder and picks each result up, as often as every five seconds.
The other direction
Reading results is the mature half of this product and it is safe to rely on. Sending orders the other way — so the analyser knows which tests to run on the tube in front of it — is real, but it is not the same maturity, and we would rather say so than discover it at your bench.
Where an analyser can be told directly, it is. Where it can only ask, the order waits until the machine scans the barcode and asks for it. It is never both at once, so a sample cannot be run twice. Failed sends are retried in a proper queue and every attempt is on the record.
Of the seventeen models it can build orders for, one is validated against a proven working implementation and the rest are written from the manufacturer’s own specification and marked for validation before clinical use. That is why it ships switched off and is commissioned per site.
What the operator sees
Logs rotate at 10 MB and keep five files, so the evidence for an incident is still there when somebody goes looking a week later.
Where we come in
Imposetech is a LISBridge partner. In practice that means the licence is provisioned for you, the connection to your analysers is set up by our engineers, and when something stops you call the same number you already call. You do not negotiate a subscription, manage a renewal, or explain your problem to somebody who has never seen your lab.
It is not tied to our own hospital software. It connects to whatever you run — and if you do run MediSpa, lab connectivity is simply part of the same conversation instead of a second project with a second supplier.
Straight answers