Orchard® Harvest™ LIS Version 8.0 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. Of the over 225 enhancements and added features, 100 were a direct result of customers’ Requests for Modifications (RFM).

            “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.  We strongly encourage feedback because we understand its importance to building a very flexible LIS that accommodates a variety of workflows,” 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. All of our upgrades are offered at no charge to all customers with a current support contract.”

            Jeffery Kain, Executive Vice President, adds, “Orchard Harvest LIS 8.0 continues to set the bar for quality and features in a modern laboratory information system. 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.”

            “Orchard Harvest LIS is extremely flexible utilizing configurable rules-based technology.  This technology allows the user to define “if-then” scenarios specific to the needs of their lab 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 LIS 8.0 is the direct result of working closely with our clients to increase laboratory 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.”

The upcoming release of version 8.0 heralds the arrival of many new features, including:

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

• Very useful to hospitals in particular, in addition to routine, STAT, and ASAP, there are now user-defined priorities that can be assigned to order choices, such as Timed, Pre-Op, or 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 (e.g., maiden name, nickname, etc.). This is a great benefit to 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 will greatly reduce duplicate patients in the database, preventing errors and confusion.

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

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