The Rise of Hybrid Laboratories: Combining the Best of Both Worlds
The COVID-19 pandemic has forever changed the way teams interact with each other and with work. It is now necessary for laboratories to adapt or lose important talent and productivity.
Today’s article will teach you how to use cloud-based lab software to adapt to a hybrid laboratory working environment and drive your team’s efficiency to new heights.
What Does Hybrid Work Look Like In a Laboratory Setting?
Hybrid work is an adaptable work model that endorses a blend of in-office, remote, and on-the-go workers. It allows employees to work wherever they are most productive.
While there is no way to completely run a laboratory remotely, there are many benefits to embracing a hybrid model in which data created in the laboratory can be processed, analyzed, and discussed from anywhere.
This means that on-site workers can access the data they need to receive, process, and store their samples while allowing remote workers to process the data to find results and trends. Additionally, a cloud-based laboratory software can even provide information directly to clients without any interruptions in the flow of information.
Why Have Laboratories Adopted Hybrid Working?
During the COVID-19 pandemic, many businesses were forced to close their doors and provide their workforce with virtual collaboration tools to keep them productive. As workplace culture has shifted to a hybrid work environment, lab personnel have requested the same flexibility.
In order for lab personnel to work both in-person and remotely, a cloud-based LIMS system is required to support sharing and collaboration across the team while enforcing security standards.
One of the many benefits of a cloud-based lab software is giving team members easy access to their work. The cloud is accessible to anyone using the internet. Each team member can log in to these applications and access their project summaries, test data, sample histories, and anything else they need to complete their job.
While scientists perform many of their tasks on a bench, a cloud based LIMS allows lab personnel to perform data entry, analysis, review, and reporting from wherever the scientist works best – as long as they have a cloud based LIMS that can support all of these types of tasks from a remote location.
Five Benefits of Hybrid Working Using a Cloud-Based LIMS System
Here are five benefits you’ll start enjoying just by implementing a cloud-based lab software like Lockbox LIMS.
1. Better Teamwork via Asynchronous Collaboration
Fully on-premise teams have a straightforward way of sharing information, as it is possible to communicate needs directly to your peers.
Although this way of interacting seems quicker in some cases, it is limited by the mandate of synchronicity. When key stakeholders are unavailable, processes can stall out, waiting for physical availability.
Hybrid working has accelerated the concept of asynchronous collaboration. People can now review data collaboratively without being in the same room simultaneously, and LIMS-based software like Lockbox contains all of the tools needed to allow this mindset transition.
Technicians can upload their test results from their browsers and instantly send a request for review to their lab manager. The lab manager will receive an email to log on to the account and review the data from anywhere without requiring face-to-face discussions with the technician.
The information related to projects, clinical studies, shipments, samples, instruments, and reagent stocks is all collected in one place for everybody with the correct permission set to access and review.
All these new features make managing data faster and easier to scale, making all your process faster and reducing the risk of human errors, memory failures, and manual data entry.
2. Reduce Cost and Increase Flexibility
In the traditional on-premises LIMS model, an expensive piece of equipment (the server) is physically installed in the laboratory. Getting this on-premise server installed can be a months-long project with IT, not to mention the ongoing support costs to maintain this hardware. Any future changes to expand capacity or change vendors also carries the same hefty price tags.
Conversely, by embracing a cloud-based LIMS such as Lockbox, costs are known in advance and follow an easy-to-understand user licensing model. This can bring cost savings and predictability to your budgeting and implementation timelines.
As the team works in a hybrid mode, they must access the information to perform their tasks and process the samples in a workflow.
An example is a core facility that performs next-generation sequencing (NGS) services:
- The workflow will start with a team member who will serve specimen Accessioning and Processing (Laboratory Receiving).
- The samples are received, sorted, entered into the Laboratory Information Management System (LIMS), labeled with barcoded labels, and processed, followed by another team member that executes sample QC to assess the protocol for selecting the NGS library preparation.
- The library protocol will dictate the following steps, which involve the NGS library QC and sequencing platform (Illumina, PacBio, Nanopore) to generate the data.
- In the final stage, the informatics team will process the data to generate results, creating a report to share with the clients. In NGS workflows, all team members must be aware of the information related to a project/sample before performing the next step in the workflow.
The ability to share tasks and plan more efficiently can be a money saver and make collaboration across the team seamless. Moreover, the cloud-based software’s license plan adapts as the team changes in size, increasing or decreasing as needed. Additional licenses or components can be added to an existing instance to support a lab expansion or changes in business scope without interrupting the team’s workflow.
Traditionally, The method to record the tasks was a personal notebook or an electronic document in a shared folder. While these approaches can be helpful when a lab is small, they never scale up in a way that solves your lab’s problem and just make it harder to adopt a solution to alleviate the burden of data entry and update. After a while, frustration becomes the daily feeling across users due to an inefficient and slow system.
Lockbox can change the scientist’s experience using the power of cloud-based software to deliver the solution to the requirement of a modern lab at any point in time.
3. Enhanced Scalability and Security Controls
Cloud-based software, such as Lockbox LIMS enhances scalability by giving you the power to increase or decrease IT resources with the push of a button.
Unlike on-site hardware, cloud software allows the company to increase its cloud-based users without significant reconfigurations or setbacks quickly. Scaling is achieved rapidly and efficiently, typically with little disruption or downtime.
The cloud software platforms already have all the infrastructure to support the transition.
When information is shared across multiple users, having a cloud-based LIMS in place allows setting up custom profiles with shared rules to make specific fields or objects visible and accessible to the right team. This functionality enhances security and scalability to an unparalleled level.
As the technology we use to produce and share data gets increasingly more advanced, so do the hackers that threaten its security. With Lockbox, you can rest assured knowing security is a top priority.
The system administrator can easily set up custom profiles and permissions down to a specific field on a record so only a user with the proper authorization can create, edit, or delete.
Switching to the cloud can open up access to state-of-the-art security standards. Having security features like multi-factor authentication (or MFA) out of the box adds an extra layer of protection against threats like phishing attacks, increasing safety for your business and your customers.
4. Business Continuity
The Covid-19 pandemic has shown the world that businesses must adapt and change rapidly to survive in adverse circumstances. While that was an extremely unusual situation, preparedness must be essential to a modern laboratory.
Building a strongly documented LIMS allows for the sharing of technical know-how and procedures to help laboratories react promptly when team members can no longer perform their job for personal circumstances or career changes.
Business continuity is vital to completing projects, delivering results, and fulfilling client contractual obligations. A cloud-based LIMS can make training for a new staff member easier because all the procedures and workflows are recorded in the system and shared across relevant team members.
Lockbox LIMS provides a protocol training module that can provide a list of training required for a team member with a specific role within the organization and a list of authorized instruments that can be accessed for performing their tasks.
5. Boosted agility and innovation
When a geographical area does not restrict a business’s ability to attract new resources, it is easier to find new talent that can boost innovation.
The combination of hybrid working and asynchronous collaboration using cloud-based software allows laboratories to tap into the potential of their team members. The ability to share information across teams also makes it possible to communicate better across departments and optimize and improve processes, leading to better product understanding and rapid troubleshooting.
Wrapping Up
Adopting cloud-based software and a hybrid working laboratory environment will allow you to scale your operations up and down as needed, adapting your laboratory for any shift in demand without interrupting your services or creating bottlenecks in growth.
But beyond this flexibility, embracing cloud software is about empowering scientists to work on their own terms with all of their data at their fingertips from anywhere.
If you are considering adopting a cloud-based LIMS for your laboratory, you can contact our team and book a demo to review the full functionality with Lockbox.