Information technology, health care, and the future: what are the implications for the clinical laboratory?

As new information systems are offered for the clinical laboratory, advanced applications and improvements in computer hardware continue to dominate marketing presentations and fascinate the decision maker. However, the most important issue for all of our clinical information systems is not the speed of the hardware, the reliability of the systems software, or the ability of applications to carry out routine tasks in some novel or elegant manner. Rather, it is "coping"--the ability of a system to manage new issues that arise as information requirements change over time and to manage all the unexpected events that occur in the course of regular work but that do not follow the usual sequence of procedures. The need for new processing conventions to cope with unexpected situations without creating new problems is not unique to health care. The need is present wherever the real world intrudes directly and significantly into critical operations. Moreover, the pressure to adjust to changing external circumstances continues to grow as the rate of change in our information-based society increases. The lack of general coping procedures, although long ignored, has become such a pervasive handicap that marked improvements in this type of flexibility will be introduced over this decade. New software designs that deal with coping issues are already beginning to appear and to bear fruit. When purchasing any new laboratory computer system today, software that demonstrates an effective coping flexibility should be given more weight than fascinating innovations in hardware or software that are the favorites of vendor marketers. It is now possible to test for such flexibility on a site-specific basis.