Orchard Harvest™ LIS Version 7.5 Press Release

Orchard Software’s newest version of its laboratory information system continues to add more to its already broad feature set, making Orchard Harvest LIS one of the most flexible LISs on the market today.

“We serve a variety of laboratories—POLs, clinics, hospitals, reference laboratories, student health centers, and public health facilities—and with more than 650 customers, we get a lot of good ideas and input for enhancements.  We strongly encourage feedback because we understand its importance to building a top of the class LIS,” says Rob Bush, President of Orchard Software Corporation. 

Mr. Bush continues, “Orchard is committed to developing, installing, and supporting the very best laboratory information system, and part of this commitment is our annual software upgrades.”

Orchard Software is known for its annual upgrades that address the feedback from its customers and the changes in regulatory issues.  Orchard also includes all of its upgrades at no charge to all customers with a support contract.

"Orchard Harvest LIS is one of the hottest selling LISs on the market, and I am convinced that our popularity is the result of our rules-based decision-making tools.  This technology allows the user to define “if-then” scenarios that aid in decision-making to establish consistency, simplify the training of new staff, improve productivity, and eliminate errors,” states Curt Johnson, Vice President of Sales & Marketing. 

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. 

 “Harvest 7.5 builds on the Orchard tradition of including feedback from our clients, with a full suite of new features and enhancements,” says Debbie Schilling, Director of Software Engineering.  “Our clients asked for an easy way to apply their unique business rules to incoming orders, so we are especially pleased with the many enhancements we added to Order Entry Rules.”

The upcoming release of version 7.5 heralds the arrival of many new features, and some of the new features included in Harvest LIS 7.5 are:

• Improved result delivery rules provide more flexibility in creating rules for delivering patient reports. A single rule may now contain groups of locations, providers, and other conditions, as well as have actions for multiple printers or fax destinations.

• During order entry, all-new insurance management allows the user to easily select and rearrange plans to handle any unique insurance situation to ensure reimbursement. Harvest LIS allows an unlimited number of insurance plans per patient. (See screen shot.)

• Automatic QC can be scheduled for when specific order choices are ordered for a patient. Routine QC can be scheduled to be automatically ordered as defined, using all the options previously available when creating a recurring order in Harvest LIS.

• Managing EMR and reference laboratory interfaces is easier with Harvest LIS accepting unsolicited orders. Harvest LIS can be configured to automatically create orders as it receives results from a reference lab or host system, without requiring an order being placed ahead of time.

• Automatic report scheduling capabilities have been extended to many of the management reports, such as Billing Summary, Order Choice Utilization, Test Utilization, and Collection List.

• To comply with the latest requirements set by The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (the new requirements are scheduled to go into effect on 7/1/2007), Harvest LIS can now store up to eight ICD-9 codes with each order choice.

• Date and time exclusions were added to the Turnaround Time Report, so weekends, holidays, and hours the lab is closed can be eliminated from TAT reports.

• Rules for label printing were added to control how and where Harvest LIS prints labels. Rule conditions can apply to deferred orders, released orders, AP, Microbiology, or to all labels; and rules can be written based on collection location, ordering location, and priority (routine/STAT/ASAP). (See screen shot.)