The newest version of the Orchard Harvest laboratory information system (LIS) from Orchard Software, Carmel, Ind, includes more than 225 enhancements and features—with some 100 stemming from customers’ requests for modifications.

The product offers flexibility via configurable, rules-based technology. The technology helps define if-then scenarios tailored to a lab’s needs, fostering decision-making that establishes consistency, simplifies training of new staff, improves productivity, and helps eliminate errors. 

“We have a saying around here, ‘If you’ve seen one lab, you’ve only seen one lab.’ We serve a variety of laboratories—POLs, clinics, hospitals, reference laboratories, student health centers, and public health facilities—and we get a lot of good ideas and input for enhancements,” says Rob Bush, president of Orchard Software Corp. “We strongly encourage feedback because we understand it’s importance to building a very flexible LIS that accommodates a variety of workflows.

Rules-based technology runs throughout the system for order entry, splitting orders, auto-approval of patient results, reflexing additional testing, automatic comments, clinical follow-up recommendations, result delivery, and billing/CPT codes. 

“Orchard is committed to developing, installing, and supporting the very best laboratory information system, and part of this commitment is our annual software upgrades,” Bush says. “All of our upgrades are offered at no charge to all customers with a current support contract.”

Among the new features:

•    Enhanced flexibility for customized reports, including automatically incorporating a graph of the patient’s historical results on the report. Configurable by order choice, Harvest allows users to select which historical results should display.  This is helpful for certain lab tests, such as hormone levels or cardiac enzymes. A graphical representation makes results easy to view at a glance, and gives patients a snapshot view of their progress.

•    Useful for hospitals in particular: In addition to routine, STAT, and ASAP, users can define and assign priorities, such as timed, pre-op, and pre-adm. The priority designations can be displayed in user-defined colors on worklists within the software and sorted to user specifications to ensure turnaround-time parameters are being met.  

•    Support for patient aliases (such as maiden name, nickname, etc), which helps lab personnel because all variations of the patient name are stored within the patient file and are available when searching for a particular patient in the system. This helps reduce duplicate patients in the database, and helps prevent errors and confusion.

•    Ability to schedule PRN recurring orders (standing or future orders). Harvest LIS allows flexibility in scheduling recurring (standing) orders to more closely reflect physician-ordering patterns.

•    Significant enhancements have been made to QC, making it possible to adjust QC statistics as needed.

The product is the direct result of working closely with clients to increase lab efficiency while meeting increased demand for customized creation and delivery of results, says Debbie Schilling, director of software engineering.  “More and more of the enhancements being asked for and implemented surround the user’s ability to customize the system for their unique lab,” she says.

Jeffery Kain, executive VP of development, says the product continues to set the bar for quality and features in a modern LIS. “Our commitment to continually enhance Harvest with state-of-the-art features means that our customers always have the best technology and tools available to get their work done quickly, accurately, and with the best support in the industry to back them up,” he says.

Orchard Harvest LIS is installed in hundreds of labs nationwide—including all sizes of multi-site and multi-specialty provider groups and clinics, hospitals, regional reference labs, student health centers, and public health organizations. Orchard offers a microbiology module and Orchard® Pathology to eliminate paper and electronically integrate these departments with the rest of the lab via a single, shared database. For lab outreach, its outreach systems, Orchard Harvest™ Webstation or Orchard® Copia®, provide Web-based access and EMR integration for remote-order entry and results delivery

For more information, contact Kerry Foster at (800) 856-1948 or via e-mail.