Blog Summary
Despite being a critical part of the modern healthcare system, testing labs are often underserved by outdated software vendors. These traditional vendors prioritize a broad-market product roadmap and protect their revenue from custom integrations, which creates a significant conflict of interest that hinders lab performance and interoperability. This forces labs to rely on rigid, "flapper flapper" software that requires more work than it saves. However, a new breed of lab software is emerging: low-code platforms. These platforms offer a solution to these longstanding issues by providing labs with a flexible platform to create bespoke, cost-effective software that aligns with their unique workflows, and can be easily integrated with other systems through a published API, which gives labs a direct on-ramp to the healthcare data "superhighway."
Key Questions Answered by the Article
What is the fundamental conflict of interest that hinders traditional lab software vendors?
The most glaring conflict of interest is that traditional software vendors prioritize protecting their revenue from custom integration services rather than providing easy-to-use, published APIs. This lack of interoperability forces labs into a more expensive and less efficient way of working, as they have to pay for costly manual integrations instead of seamless system-to-system data sharing.
What are the primary challenges that labs face with traditional software?
Labs face challenges with software that is not adaptable to their needs. Traditional vendors focus on a broad market, offering a generic platform with a limited feature set that often requires labs to re-engineer their own workflows to fit the software. This creates more work and can lead to backlogs, slow treatment plans, and bad outcomes.
How does low-code lab software solve these issues?
Low-code lab software solves these issues by offering a platform instead of a rigid product. This allows labs to have a unique roadmap, defining their own priorities for new features and integrations. It provides bespoke software at a lower cost than off-the-shelf solutions and, most importantly, provides a published, out-of-the-box API that enables true interoperability with the broader healthcare ecosystem, ensuring the lab is secure, compliant, and adaptable.
Why is lab software so BAD?
No matter our job, we deserve great software that removes tedium and monotony. In many cases, however, we find ourselves hitting the flipper flappers on outdated solutions that cough dust when you attempt to make them interoperate with other systems.
For testing labs, whether diagnostic, genetic, or cannabis, coughing software isn’t funny. Though labs are an integral part of a modern healthcare ecosystem, they are underserved by software vendors, causing backlogs, slow treatment plans, and bad outcomes.
Where does terrible software come from, and why hasn’t it improved? The answer lies somewhere between laboratories' evolutionary challenges and software vendors’ financial incentives.
Laboratories sit at the intersection of powerful forces that affect how they work. Government regulatory frameworks expose labs to litigation and reputational damage they strive to avoid. As we saw during COVID-19, the spread of disease can require sudden upscaling to massive volume. Labs must be flexible when infection recedes to be re-kitted for other uses. The uncertain world depends on labs’ abilities to stay secure, compliant, and adaptable.
Meanwhile, traditional software vendors cling to dated business models to the detriment of testing outcomes. Traditional vendors run a product roadmap to appeal to the broadest addressable market possible, ignoring critical last-mile lab automation in favor of a generic platform with an attractive feature matrix. They earn significant revenue on professional services for setting up systems, migrating data from old systems, and supporting ongoing customization needs. The most glaring conflict of interest is that software vendors aim to protect their custom integration revenue instead of publishing secure APIs to make systems interoperability fast and easy.
Despite these issues, laboratories still have many good reasons to use lab software, including data integrity, sample analysis at scale, and the blessed power of barcode systems. The weight of these benefits keeps these software businesses running, but there must be a better way. The labs that tirelessly test drive traditional software litter the landscape only to be rewarded with software that requires more work than it saves in labor efficiencies.
The crushing need for adaptability and interoperability directly conflicts with software vendors’ militant efforts to preserve outdated systems and business models. To avoid remedying technical debt, incumbent vendors rely on inertia to perpetuate their revenue streams. Incentives are not aligned, and software improves at a glacial pace.
The good news? Advancements in software development can fix this.
While the low-code story did not start in the laboratory space, a new breed of lab software is emerging. Unlike a SaaS product with features, low-code lab software is a platform to execute a technology strategy, offering bespoke software at a lower cost than off-the-shelf solutions.
Finally, laboratories can connect eccentric equipment, interpret new data formats, and deliver reports that directly communicate the data to the growing ecosystem of healthcare professionals.
Low-code software is the answer to longstanding issues hindering lab performance for many laboratories. Now, labs can have a unique roadmap, defining the priorities they assign to new features, stakeholder portals, data sources, and integrations. With a published, out-of-the-box API, labs have an onramp to the healthcare data superhighway.
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