Orchard Harvest™ LIS' Anatomic Pathology System Press Release

“In our effort to constantly serve a broader hospital market, we found offering an Anatomic Pathology system to be extremely beneficial to our current and future customers,” says Curt Johnson, Vice-President of Sales and Marketing at Orchard Software. While many AP departments are still disadvantaged by paper audit trails and unable to benefit from the LIS, the Orchard Harvest LIS Anatomic Pathology system has the advantage of rules-based decision-making and the integration of clinical data between departments.

Orchard is well-known in the LIS industry for its commitment to continuous product development and enhancement. “Healthcare budgets today do not allow for system changes every few years, and companies want to align themselves with a software vendor who is able to expand capabilities and upgrade as needed by the industry,” elaborates Johnson. “These are the areas in which Orchard excels.”

The AP system is fully integrated into Harvest LIS and provides direct access to cytology, pathology, and clinical laboratory results, including all historical results. A single mouse-click gives the pathologist immediate access to the patient’s entire clinical history, saving time and streamlining diagnosis. This direct integration and linking enhances communication between the clinical and AP departments.

“Integrating a fully-featured AP system into our award-winning LIS allows our customers to take advantage of a shared patient database and laboratory environment, while still providing a workflow that is unique to the Anatomic Pathology department ,” says Debbie Schilling, Director of Engineering.

The Harvest LIS AP system is designed to simplify case management. It employs a “worksheet” screen with templates that you can customize to follow your own laboratory procedures or any standardized protocol. Screen prompts assure that all required information is included, and shortcuts permit the easy addition of free-form or pre-formatted text, new procedures, or any number of other important actions. The AP system’s multi-level sign-out procedures allow cases to be forwarded for review and final approval.

The robust rules-based decision-making power made famous in Orchard’s Harvest LIS is available throughout the AP system, and result evaluation rules customize workflow scenarios to individual pathologist’s needs. As an example, send-out tests and correlations can be automatically reflex-ordered according to interpretation/results, and rules can be set up to present technical instructions automatically.

The Harvest LIS AP system’s image management tools permit a user to easily link gross and/or microscopic images to the case worksheet and patient report. The software supports a number of common image formats, as well as allows pertinent comments to be associated with each image.

 Unlike other systems, Orchard puts the power of creating ad-hoc reports in the lab, not the IT department. With the Harvest LIS AP system, evaluations, correlation studies, and many other management reports can easily be created without the need for special programming skills. Users may perform searches by specimen, diagnosis, test result, or case number using the system’s powerful data-mining capabilities. The completed reports can be printed on demand, or scheduled to print automatically at a more convenient time.