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Cathleen Melendez

What Do We Mean By Software Development Best Practices at Semaphore?

Building custom laboratory software from the ground up requires robust planning and meticulous attention to detail. In the process of doing this for our clients and ourselves on our forthcoming product, we have developed our own software development best practices to ensure the implementation meets all the requirements. We’ve found this to be a magic mix — user and regulatory […]

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Build vs. Buy: Which is the Right Informatics Strategy for Your Lab?

Are you trying to decide if your lab should build its own custom software, buy off-the-shelf software (knowing you’ll inevitably have to customize it), or just keep stumbling along with Excel and paper-based tracking? The answer to this question will ultimately depend on your short- and long-term information system (informatics) strategy. How do you devise an informatics strategy? There are […]

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What Labs Need to Know About Risk Management in Software

Every time we ride a bicycle, drive a car, or travel by plane, we’re faced with the risk of injury. While we can’t completely eliminate all the risks, we can reduce our chances of getting hurt — think bicycle helmets, seat belts, and oxygen masks. Similarly, clinical diagnostic labs have to accept a certain amount of risk (this is known […]

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How to Set Up Your Software Environment for Maximum Productivity in the Lab

In today’s evolving market, labs inevitably need to make changes within their informatics software stack. The greater your lab’s efficiency in making these changes, the easier you’ll be able to keep up with new demands and innovations. How your software environment is set up can make a huge difference in how quickly you can validate new processes and updates to […]

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Software Quality: What Role Does Testing Play?

No discussion about software quality would be complete without examining the role of software testing. In the previous post in this series on quality, we mentioned that software testing is a vital part of software quality control (QC). That’s because it’s used to find and prevent defects, ensure performance, and confirm that requirements are met. “Testing is the procedure of […]

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Software Architecture: What Makes it Good, or Not?

Clinical diagnostic laboratories must have high-quality software in order to run reliably and efficiently. But quality is about more than just the software code. Quality must also be the foundation of the software architecture. When labs prioritize the quality of their software and software architecture, ensuring it’s built thoughtfully from the ground up, the quality and maintainability of their processes […]

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Four Popular Search Topics for Labs in 2021

In the past twelve months, we’ve covered a lot of ground on the blog, and many of the posts have clearly resonated with clinical labs. So, we thought it would be interesting to share the topics that readers like you have been most interested in. Not surprisingly, these tie into what’s been happening in the clinical diagnostics sector this year. […]

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Software Quality and Lab Quality: What’s the Difference?

As we mentioned in our previous post in this series, the quality of your software refers to its ability to meet requirements. There are a variety of metrics you can use to measure quality — with varying degrees of importance depending on who you ask and what aspects you want to measure. Fortunately, a number of standards can guide you, […]

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Lab Software Quality: What is Validation & Why is it Important?

Software quality is a broad topic and often not well understood by clinical diagnostic laboratories, which is why we thought it might be helpful to offer a quick primer. Commonly, the “quality” of software refers only to its ability to meet a set of requirements. But meeting requirements is just one of many metrics for measuring quality and if you […]

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Choosing the Best LIMS: How to Apply an Effective Data-Driven Selection Process

This week’s post comes from Vincent Briere of Vertiance. Vincent is a strategic technology leader and business partner driving enterprise growth and business performance via scalable information technology. He’s worked in the area of business application selection for many years and has developed a rapid data-driven process. It’s a process we would recommend to the clinical diagnostic laboratories we work […]

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