Despite the rapid advances in medical laboratory systems, little use is being made of computers or even programmable calculators in many small research laboratories. Many of these laboratories would benefit from the use of a small computer system to monitor their test procedures, handle their test result reporting, provide diagnostic decision support, maintain their data for later research purposes, and perform administrative support and billing functions. We have developed a laboratory information system which is currently being used by two state screening laboratories. We propose to modify this system to meet the needs of small research laboratories have in obtaining software is that it must be customized to their needs; this software would be user configurable so as to avoid the cost of creating custom software. During Phase I of this project we examined the needs of a set of small research laboratories, determined their common requirements, and designed the modifications to generalize our existing software to meet these needs. During Phase II of this project we will modify and rewrite our software, test the resulting generalized software in a variety of small laboratories, and making any further modifications required. We will produce extensive user documentation to allow the user to configure the final system without expert help.
