December 02, 2018
Orchard Harvest LIMS Review: "Flexible, Powerful, Archaic"
Harvest is used by the entire organization. It is used to control and connect our patient results, instruments, reference labs, doctors, and EHR. It is used by our phlebotomists, lab techs, and med techs in their daily activities when collecting and working with patient samples. Because it is also connected to our instruments it removes the need to manually enter the results from those instruments. These results are then sent to our providers via HL7 messages, fax, or email.
- Rules Engine - We use rules to customize what happens when entering orders, evaluating results, or sending results. We are also able to run them based on location.
- Interfaces - It is connected to our EHR and reference lab. This allow us to send and receive results, demographics, billing, ect easily and to and from one another.
- Advanced Configuration Options - I love to hate them. While you can do a lot in the settings, there is a wall of text that you can use to customize even more how Harvest behaves and does.
- Event Logs - When something goes wrong it does a good job to logging what happened.
- User Interface - The software is like 25 years old, and it feels like it. They have added some buttons and links to try to make it easier, but it's not as flashy as the SaaS applications that are being built these days. It feels like there isn't a lot of time spent on refining the features, just adding more to it.
- Archaic Architecture - The application use 4D for the database. This means that you can't use SQL for queries, latency is a huge issue and there isn't a hosted option. You have to have your own in-house server to run the server application.
- Client is an Application - We have workstations dedicated to managing the interfaces. These workstations have to run the application as a program and can not run them as a service. This means that if you want to apply Windows updates it required manually closing and re-launching the application.
- Data Mining - There are some basic reports, but they do not really allow you to build complex reports about the patients or work being performed.