Quality Control Archives - INTERACTIVE SOFTWARE

How a LIMS Helps You Manage Quality Control in Your Lab or Biobank

Sharon Williams — Mon, 25 May 2020 08:00:23 +0000

Many labs and Biobanks choose to implement a Laboratory Information Management System (LIMS) to help them meet regulatory compliance. When you’re frantically preparing for the auditor’s visit it’s difficult to remember that the purpose of regulation and compliance is to ensure quality and safety. When using spreadsheets to track your samples and lab processes, it’s often impossible to record everything. And what you do capture may not be consistently recorded. Without accurate and complete data, you may lack confidence in your samples, processes and results. It might also take you longer to find the samples you need to carry out your work. Likewise, if you’re using several separate systems with information diluted or, even worse, duplicated across your labs. A LIMS system is designed to centralise your data, improving its integrity and quality. But a LIMS just doesn’t help with quality control in data – it also helps monitor your processes, samples, equipment and team. Plus, it helps instil consistency by enforcing your processes. All this helps you to meet regulatory compliance and manage quality in your lab. The importance of data You rely on your data to help make important decisions and assess the performance of your lab or […]

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LIMS CAPA Management for Process Quality Control and Improvement

Gary Rooksby — Tue, 14 Apr 2020 08:00:04 +0000

Efficient and standardised business processes are fundamental to the effective running of a lab or biobank. That’s why it’s so important to have clearly documented Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs). Hopefully your SOPs closely match your business requirements and everything’s nice and rosy. But what if they don’t? Or if your business needs change? In that case you need to update your SOPs. This might include documenting the issue or change as well as noting any corrective and preventative actions (CAPA). You want to be able to handle these updates efficiently. After all, you’ve all got your day job to be getting on with. Could a laboratory information management system (LIMS) help you manage such SOP changes along with any associated CAPA? Audits to the rescue So, how do you ensure that your SOPs are still working effectively? Well, an audit works well. But the mere mention of an audit can strike fear into the hearts of many. Done badly they can be really intrusive and disruptive to the normal work processes and that’s counterproductive. If the act of reviewing a process causes that process to change then it’s not capturing a true result. Really effective audits need to be light […]

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Building proactive lab auditing into your daily routine

Gary Rooksby — Thu, 10 Oct 2019 15:51:19 +0000

The thought of a lab audit might be enough to bring you out in a cold sweat. The dread of an audit for some is akin to a phobia. Desensitisation is said to be the most effective cure for a phobia – would this approach work for audits, too? Making lab auditing a part of your daily routine so it becomes habit might sound difficult. If it’s built into your everyday processes – it no longer becomes something extra for you to think about. But where do you start? As the start of the well-known phrase goes ‘little and often…’ If you carry out a little audit work on a regular basis it quickly becomes a part of your weekly or daily routine. And you can do this without a major impact on your workload. You could schedule, say, an hour each Friday afternoon to spot-check your samples and processes carried out during the week. If you then log the results in a formal log, you will quickly build a body of testing evidence to show management and the external auditors when the time comes. It also means that you’ve got a good chance of spotting an error – and […]

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Using Laboratory Information Management Software for sample inventory management

Sharon Williams — Thu, 03 Oct 2019 10:54:10 +0000

Do you know what’s in your laboratory sample freezers and storage without opening them? If you dread the questions “Now, where did we put that sample?” or “What do you think is in that container?”, then it might be time to think about using a laboratory information management system (LIMS) to help you manage your sample inventory. You may be thinking “we already use Excel that tells us where our samples are”. Or even “our sample management system displays our freezers as a picture so we can see where our samples are”. That’s great but what about finding available space? Could you easily move and audit your samples if there was a problem with the freezer? Or reserve contiguous spaces in storage for samples you’re expecting to receive or create? There’s more to a LIMS than just displaying a pretty view of your samples in your freezers. Samples aren’t just stored in freezers You may store your biospecimens in all sorts of places, not just freezers. What about your cupboard with your histology slides, fridges, drawers and good old-fashioned boxes? Plus, even if you only store samples in freezers these come in all sorts of configurations and layouts. So, you’ll […]

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