LabLynx, Inc.

09/08/2026

Buy the wrong lab system and you find out on the first morning, not during the demo.

The clearest example is history. After a conversion, no patient has any history in the new system, so automated delta checks have nothing to compare against. A delta check is the flag that fires when a result has moved implausibly since the last one. Nothing looks broken. The system simply has no past, and every check that depends on a past has quietly stopped existing. Transfusion services are separately exposed where historical blood type was not migrated, which can mean a second draw before products are issued.

None of that appears in a feature comparison. And the feature lists really have converged: plenty of products serve both markets, and a vendor using both terms on a page is doing search coverage rather than misleading you.

What has not converged is the regulation and the data model. An LIS is built around a patient, a requisition and an accession number, under CLIA, with an EHR on one side and billing on the other. A LIMS is built around a sample, a client, a project and a holding-time clock, under ISO/IEC 17025 or 21 CFR Part 11.

Our new article covers both, plus why a clinical lab says accessioning and an environmental lab says sample login for the same moment, and the one question worth asking a vendor that the acronym cannot answer.

The two acronyms describe systems built around different objects, a patient and a sample. The feature lists have converged. The regulation and the data model have not, and that surfaces at go-live.

08/26/2026

A LIMS is not hard to buy. It is hard to implement.

The difference comes down to a short list of decisions that get made badly, early, and quietly, long before anyone signs a contract. Who owns the data model. Which instruments are actually in scope. What the lab stops doing. Who signs off validation.

Our new guide walks through how a LIMS works, where implementation time really goes, and the signs a lab is not ready to write requirements yet.

A LIMS records the chain of custody, method and result for every sample. The decisions that sink projects get made before the demo. Here they are, in order.

08/13/2026

Compliance calendars go stale quietly. A date gets vacated by a court, a rule gets enacted but not made operative, and the calendar on your wall keeps showing it as a deadline.

So we built ours with a review date at the top and a status line on every single entry. Reviewed as of 10 August 2026:

CLIA Subpart M personnel requirements: in force, grandfathering applies
FDA laboratory developed test rule: vacated, all four phase-in dates void
FDA QMSR: in force since 2 February 2026, QSIT withdrawn
BIOSECURE Act: enacted, not yet operative
OMB list of companies of concern: pending, due 18 December 2026
ISO/IEC 17025 revision: unconfirmed, check with your accreditation body

Details on who each one reaches, and what the four things every framework asks for:
https://www.lablynx.com/resources/articles/2026-laboratory-compliance-guide/

08/11/2026

You can assemble a defensible LIMS business case in one afternoon, using records your lab already holds.

Four numbers: hours per week spent transcribing and assembling reports by hand, repeat tests triggered by a missing record rather than bad analysis, person-hours spent preparing for your last assessment, and findings that showed up in both of your last two assessment reports.

Use a fully loaded hourly rate, agreed with your finance team before you start calculating. That one step keeps the conversation off the arithmetic later.

New article has the formulas for each line, plus how to state a payback period that survives scrutiny:
https://www.lablynx.com/resources/articles/laboratory-informatics-roi/

08/06/2026

A PDF of a chromatogram is a representation of the run. It is not always the original record.

Where the instrument's native data file is the original, the audit trail needs to show that the native file was captured, not only its printed form. This is the point where a lot of labs discover that what they have preserved is a picture of the data rather than the data.

Our new ELabELN article takes one method qualification record with eight audit trail entries and reads them the way an auditor would. What the creation entry proves about which template version governed the work. Why a reason field reading "correction" or "per SOP" gives a reviewer nothing to verify. Why "performed by" and "reviewed and approved" are two different assertions and a signature needs to say which. And the four gaps that speak loudest by not being there, starting with the shared login.

https://www.elabeln.com/resources/articles/audit-trail-example-what-inspectors-review/

08/04/2026

Two samples, five to seven months apart. That is what a groundwater system serving 10,000 or fewer people needs at every entry point before its PFAS initial monitoring results are due.

The due date is April 26, 2027. Count backward from there, leave room for laboratory turnaround and state reporting, and that first sample needs to be collected well before the end of 2026.

Most PFAS coverage since May has been about deadlines moving. EPA proposed giving eligible drinking water systems the option to request up to two more years, to 2031, to meet the PFOA and PFOS treatment limits. That proposal does not touch the monitoring deadline, and EPA's own guidance says so directly.

Our new article walks through what initial monitoring actually requires by system type, whether older UCMR 5 results can count toward it, which methods are approved, and where these deadlines get missed in practice.

https://www.lablynx.com/resources/articles/pfas-initial-monitoring-deadline/

07/30/2026

"Our ERP handles traceability."

True, and it is half the record.

The FDA moved the FSMA 204 date to July 2028. Retail customers did not move theirs. Kroger's was June 30, 2025. Walmart and Sam's Club set August 1, 2025, and Walmart's supplier guidance addresses the FDA extension directly by saying it expects the original timelines regardless.

Here is the part most coverage skips. The ERP owns the shipping side: the advance ship notice, the pallet and case labels, the EDI transmission. That work belongs there. But the traceability lot code gets assigned when input lots become a new product, which is the same moment the QC lab pulls its sample. From then on, the ERP holds where the lot went and the lab holds whether it should have gone anywhere at all.

Nothing in the retailer requirement checks that those two records are correctly joined. A timed trace does. So does a mock recall. So does an FDA traceback.

New article on the four places that join breaks and what to fix first:

https://www.lablynx.com/resources/articles/fsma-204-retailer-requirements/

07/28/2026

Four steps, and none of them is a phone call.

1. Your client submits a sample requisition through your lab's branded portal and gets a reference number to label the sample.
2. It appears in your ELabELN right away as a sample record. Nothing gets re-typed.
3. Your staff work the sample in the ELN exactly the way they do today, then attach the report there.
4. The client sees the status change and downloads the report from the portal.

That is the ELabELN Lab Portal. It runs on the ELN your lab already uses, with no separate database behind it and no per-user fees for your clients.

Built for labs that take in samples from outside: contract and reference labs, genomics and sequencing cores, environmental and food testing, academic core facilities.

https://www.elabeln.com/lab-portal/

07/23/2026

Results_final.docx. Results_final_v2.docx. Results_v2_edits.docx. Somewhere in that chain is the version you actually want, and nobody is completely sure which one it is.

That is what happens when a research record lives in Google Docs, OneNote, and spreadsheets. The tools work fine day to day, right up until a reviewer, an auditor, or a new hire needs to rely on what is in them.

Our new article walks through moving that record into an electronic lab notebook (ELN) without losing the work you have already done, and without stopping the lab to do it:

https://www.elabeln.com/resources/articles/migrate-google-docs-onenote-spreadsheets-eln/

07/21/2026

Every lab has one: the Access database or master spreadsheet that one person built years ago, that nobody else fully understands, and that holds the whole operation together. It works fine, right up until that person leaves and the logic walks out the door with them.

Moving to a laboratory information management system (LIMS) captures that logic before it disappears, and you can do it without a break in testing by phasing the move one workflow at a time.

Our new article lays out how labs make that transition without going dark, and what actually happens to your historical data along the way:

https://www.lablynx.com/resources/articles/migrating-off-spreadsheets-to-a-lims/