3 posts tagged with "Healthcare"

Most lab-to-EMR integrations in 2026 still use HL7 v2. That sentence is mildly controversial — every industry conference, every vendor demo, every standards-body roadmap names FHIR R4 as "the modern standard". The roadmap is real; the production reality is that the majority of clinical-lab traffic still moves over HL7 v2 messages because Epic, Cerner, Meditech, Allscripts, athenahealth, and eClinicalWorks all support v2 as their primary integration mode, and the lab on the other end already speaks v2. FHIR R4 adoption is climbing meaningfully — most major EMRs now expose FHIR endpoints — but the bulk of orders and results still cross the wire as ORM^O01 and ORU^R01 messages. This post is the side-by-side comparison: wire format, message types, transport, tooling, real-world coverage, and the migration trade-offs every lab eventually faces.

Westgard rules are the statistical patterns a clinical laboratory uses to decide whether a quality-control (QC) run is in-control or out-of-control. First published by James Westgard in Clinical Chemistry in 1981, the six base rules — 1-2s, 1-3s, 2-2s, R-4s, 4-1s, 10-x — combine into multi-rule sets that catch both random and systematic analytical errors with a low false-rejection rate. This post is a working reference: the precise trigger condition for each rule, the clinical interpretation, why 1-2s is a warning rather than a rejection, the canonical multi-rule set, and how to read a Levey-Jennings chart that visualises everything together. This post is a standalone primer for anyone who needs the rules, independent of any product.

:::note LabFlow does not implement quality control today Quality control is planned and unbuilt — see the roadmap. Nothing below describes a LabFlow feature. :::

A Laboratory Information Management System (LIMS) is the operational software a laboratory uses to manage samples, run tests, validate results, generate patient reports, bill for the work, and prove to regulators that every step happened correctly. It is the system of record for a lab's day-to-day operations — from the moment a patient walks in (or a sample arrives by courier) to the moment the result is released and the invoice is paid. A LIMS is not a clinical decision-support tool, not a generic ERP, and not the same thing as an Electronic Medical Record (EMR) — though it integrates with all three. This post is the definitional primer: what a LIMS actually does, the terms-of-art that distinguish it from adjacent systems, and the modern cloud-multi-tenant patterns that have become the 2026 default.