Webinars

^{Michael Kalinowski}: Okay. I think we're ready to begin. So I will say hello to everybody that is taking some time out of their busy schedules to join us for this webinar. And also a big thank you to both Corey Handelsman, Director of IT at Summit Pathology, and our own Allison Still, LIS Product Specialist at LigoLab Information Systems for also setting aside some time to discuss what I think is going to be a really interesting topic based on the amount of interest leading into this webinar. Let’s discuss LIS System rules, automation, and data analytics, and how they can increase efficiency and cut costs. Corey, Allison, welcome. 

^{Corey Handelsman}: Thank you. 

^{Michael Kalinowski}: All right. Let's dive right in. And for anybody that's in the laboratory space, these challenges will likely not be a surprise. Demand for services gets higher with every passing day, increased competition between your lab and others trying to differentiate in the marketplace and gain an edge.

That's what all clinical laboratories and pathology groups are after these days. And doing so while the labor pool is shrinking. It's a problem throughout healthcare but it has had a real big impact on laboratory space. And then of course, related are costs of labor and supplies that continue to rise as well.

Yeah, it's a challenging time. 

Corey, from the Summit Pathology point of view, I'm guessing these are familiar challenges. What’s your take on that list and is there anything we might have missed?

^{Corey Handelsman}: Yeah, I think that's fairly spot on. The reality is that, there's just more and more competition and consolidation in the market.

Allison and I are both here in Colorado and and we've witnessed fewer and fewer independent pathology groups around as the larger entities like LabCorp and Quest are acquiring facilities and to be competitive, you really need the tools that allow you to do things like look for efficiencies, quickly get clean claims out the door, and really assess your business model and how it works and make strategic business decisions in light of things like labor and whatnot being at short supply and costs being on the rise. 

^{Michael Kalinowski}: Allison you deal with our laboratory partners on a regular basis, on a daily basis. Anything you can add, anything that you hear in general as you go about your day? 

_{Allison Still}: I guess the one thing that came to mind for me for this is automation, AI and the increase in technology. I don't hear that from our clients too much, but I do think that it is definitely what leads to interest in the automation and other laboratory information system functions we provide. 

^{Michael Kalinowski}: All right. I think that's a pretty good segue into what we're going to focus on during today's webinar, which is how medical labs can achieve growth and profitability despite the challenges with lab information system rules, automation, and data analytics.

So let's focus on what Summit Pathology is doing with the advanced LIS system technology they've incorporated into their clinical lab workflow, and how using an advanced laboratory information system software really benefits Summit’s business.

Maybe the best place to start is to talk a little bit about the lab workflow action queues and automation and how they are working for Summit Pathology. 

^{Corey Handelsman}: Yeah, sure, and just a little bit of background. We've been using LigoLab’s pathology lab software since 2009, so we've had a lot of changes over time to our workflows and we've adapted to them and the flexibility of the LIS system has been a crucial part to accommodating changes, whether they were changes that were needed for compliance or just to grow successfully. 

Replacing checklists is a huge thing because it gave us the ability to have something automatically go into not just a workflow action queue, but multiple workflow action queues when there are multiple things that have to happen to any given accession or result before it's out the door to be QC'd.

So we rely heavily on building and testing out workflow actions queues that can allow us to really funnel every case where it needs to be and make sure whatever action has to happen before it's released happens. This is crucial for quality control when we have new employees and when we bring on new pathologists before they're credentialed.

With certain payers, we have to do overreads so we can funnel all these into a workflow action queue where other pathologists can overread the cases, get them out the door, and we can be submitting claims in a reasonable time frame. 

As far as things like laboratory revenue cycle management (lab RCM), this is where we have the ability to communicate with our medical coders and make sure that everything is coded appropriately. We have a system in place to not let a test go to our lab billing company before it receives diagnosis coding.

We've also been able to leverage this to make sure that, for those of you that participate in in MIPS reporting, a Senate-based payment system from CMS, this allows us to make sure every time there's a required MIPS code on a case based on a CPT code it stays in the workflow action queue until it's handled. That's really something that we couldn't function without. We rely on this day in, day out for multiple processes.

^{Michael Kalinowski}: I think that'll get a lot of people's attention. Saving money on full time equivalents, directly helping out when it comes to laboratory profitability. 

Allison, if you're ready to go, we can have you share your screen and demonstrate a little bit about the workflow action queues and how they work.

_{Allison Still}: So here I'm sharing our LIS laboratory information system demo environment. Corey did a really good introduction. QC, like he’s describing, I think is one of the most common uses and something that the workflow action queues are really useful for. Here I have another popular use case which is a form of QC for incoming issues with orders.

Just to back up a second, the main purpose of the workflow actions in LigoLab are to facilitate any auxiliary workflow the lab might have that is unique to them. Corey's lab might want to QC different steps than another lab down the street. And the workflow actions, think of them like tags that are applied to whatever you want to check.

So in our LIS system, it could be at different levels, like maybe the order, individual results, specimens, reports, whatever level you want to check. The word flashing could be added manually, like by a person who sees an issue, or maybe it's added on using the rules engine. I think in Corey's case, like that needs diagnosis codes, right?

Does any pathology report that's released need to be QC'd to make sure the diagnosis codes are correct? And then as these workflow actions are created, it creates a queue like we see here. Really conveniently, all the columns that you see in the workflow action queue are customizable. Any information you want to see about the case, the client, and the patient can be placed here and also in these groupings.

So yeah, in this scenario, this is for incoming issues like at accessioning. Like maybe the date of birth doesn't match between the vial and the requisition. Or just specimen was leaking and you might not have enough for testing. Any kind of issue like that accumulates in a queue like this.

So I think this really helps labs. A lot of them might not be tracking their issues. Or certainly if they are, they're doing it in Excel or maybe even on paper. Having this record in the LIS lab application and being able to handle that issue is really useful. You can run stats on these, like how many issues did we have from this client last month or what kinds of issues are we getting most commonly?

The existence or presence of this pending workflow action on the order can prevent the report from being released until the issue is handled. So you don't want to release the report until maybe you can go through the entire processing.

Let's go with our date of birth discrepancy example. Maybe it was April 5th or May 5th. It's not going to make a big difference on the diagnosis, but we want to make sure it's correct on the report. So we'll hold the report until we get confirmation from the client for what the correct date of birth is.

From this queue you can handle the workflow actions individually or as a batch, depending on what level the workflow action is on. This one shows a case summary like you might see in search and it opened up our requisition so they could see the attachment side by side.

But if this was a report QC, it could just open to the report preview. And then once you resolve the issue, you'll perform it. It's always gonna date stamp when it's created, when it was resolved, who created it, who resolved it, inputting comments and all that good stuff.

^{Corey Handelsman}: Yeah, to add to that from Allison, what I want to emphasize here is that what's so cool about this is that this can be happening in parallel with the case being processed. So if you guys aren't already doing this, your pathologist can still be working the cases, but this might not just have a missing date of birth. It might also have a missing payer, and those can be in two different workflow actions that are being worked by different departments or different individuals while the case is being processed. And in a perfect world that all coincides, the case gets released, everything's been handled by the time it's done.

But even if not, the pathologist has already handled the case. It's released and it's just pending. It's held up because you haven't finished the payer information, or the date of birth. So you can really just send this out there. All the missing pieces are being handled while it's being worked on, and I think that's where a lot of these efficiencies really come in.

^{Michael Kalinowski}: Thanks. All right. I think we'll have Corey share his screen now. I know prior to this webinar, Corey and I had a discussion about different topics that we might want to discuss here. MIPS reporting caught my attention. What Summit Pathology has been able to do is a real lesson learned potentially for others out there.

So Corey, feel free to share your screen and show us a little bit about the automation with your custom MIPS reporting and then how it's benefited Summit Pathology. 

^{Corey Handelsman}: Yeah, so this is something that we rely on heavily and I wanted to share this particular example because it really stuck out to me for one reason. We built this a little over five years ago, and this was when I was really new to LigoLab’s pathology lab reporting software and didn't fully understand how the whole LIS system worked.

But this tool, because it's just based on logic, if you have experience with databases or any sort of relational database background, you're going to be able to figure it out. And it's really powerful. Maybe we build this a little more efficiently today, but it hasn't failed us. I think that's what's really cool. 

So here, what we have is an automation that is actually relying on two different workflow action queues. So when a case gets released, if it's the first time it's released, it's going to go into our lab order workflow action queue, and that's going to be worked by our coders, and they're going to be going to this code and review queue where they're going to go through and add the diagnosis codes.

If this is an addendum or a send out test came back, or it's being re-released for some reason, it's going to go into our lab test result workflow action queue, but still the same process there, except for if any CPT code that's already received MIPS coding won't be rejected. And so it's going to go through and say, okay, is there any ADA 305s in the case? And if there is, is there also one of these ICD 10 codes? 

So your coder has the ICD 10 code, it's looking for that combination, and if it is, then if one of these combinations exists, then it bumps into this next node, where it says, okay, MIPS is required, and we're going to need to have one of these codes.

Otherwise, it'll go on, and it'll go to the next one, and we're looking for a 88309, and then 88104, whatever it is. And so going through there, and this is also going to restrict what MIPS codes the coders are going to be able to enter into that case because that combination is already specified.

You can only have these specific codes. This has allowed us to basically stop having a manually review or submit our MIPS coding to CMS and CAP for reporting. We've gone from an extremely manual process where we used to have a pull cases and show them examples to being one of the highest, or last year being the highest scoring on MIPS reporting that CAP had seen. 

So this is just something that's really streamlined workflows to where it has become a set it and forget it thing. And if there's a new code, you just go in and update the LIS system. You can go in and update the codes that are available for that combination.

If there's a new combination that requires a code, then you just add the MIPS code that's required to it. From our experience, when we have other similar automations like this, they look complicated, but once you get the hang of them, they're really straightforward. You can start applying this to a lot of your workflows and just know that things are there. It's a lot of peace of mind for us, and it's allowed us to maximize our CMS reimbursements as well. 

^{Michael Kalinowski}: I think it does look complicated. So maybe expand on that Corey and Allison feel free to weigh in as well. How did you go about setting up this automation? Did it require external help? How much was done by Summit Pathology?

^{Corey Handelsman}: So this one didn't. This was when I started with Summit myself and then the former director of IT at Summit, we built this together. To be honest, we went up to the LIS system’s online help option and looked up automations and started playing around with it. We were able to put it together and it took a lot of testing because at first it didn't work, of course, and then we just went back and forth until we were able to figure out all the logic and the pieces that we needed.

But the thing is that these fields are available to you, and I think that's the key, because you have access to these fields of LigoLab, you can pull them into these automations and we played with it until it worked. For other automations we have had to work with LigoLab and I think Allison's actually helped us out with several in the past.

We've also worked with various teams to build custom fields when we've needed them and they were quite accommodating. That's allowed us to really dive in to put this all together. Sometimes there are things that require custom scripts and that's going to require assistance from the development team. 

But having access to them and being able to explain what you're looking and what you're trying to do for the outcome and then seeing whether or not that's a possibility is where this works. 

I think, in a few slides from now we’ll be talking about collaboration, but that's been one of the benefits to us, being able to collaborate directly and communicate with people like Allison, but also directly with the developers and the interface team when we need enhancements that will really benefit us and our clients.

^{Michael Kalinowski}: Allison, anything you'd like to add?

_{Allison Still}: I didn't have any developer experience or even any IT background before I worked with LigoLab, and I found it pretty easy to operate the LIS software. Again, it's just a logic problem so if you are able to think that way, or like logic puzzles, it comes very naturally. It’s absolutely user-friendly and easy to set up. And that's great that you used the online help. I'm glad that was helpful. 

^{Corey Handelsman}: Yeah, and you can see here when you go into these things, it's nice because you don't have to script it. Sometimes it's a lot quicker to script things if you know how to do that and I usually prefer to, but in something like this, you go in there and you can add. What codes do you want to add into here? You can add those. You start with one one here and then you make it match and you have whatever output you want and then if that works, you can start layering onto it. 

You break it and you fix it so I do think it's a little intimidating maybe at first. but once you have a test and train environment, play with it and LigoLab is there to assist when you need it. So don't be shy about it 

^{Michael Kalinowski}: Going back to the MIPS reporting there were two things that caught my attention. Big time saver. Which is huge for anybody that works within a lab, and then the highest scoring CAP-certified lab in the country. So congrats to Corey and his team for that. 

Corey, thanks for sharing. I can go back to the slide deck and we can continue our discussion and move on to laboratory information system LIS flexibility and customized reporting. 

I was also very impressed with what I heard previously from Corey when it comes to stats and dynamic reports and what Summit Pathology is doing in this regard. Corey, please explain a little bit about the operation there and how you're using stats and dynamic reports to your benefit.

^{Corey Handelsman}: Yeah, so we're a data heavy lab. We really rely on metrics for decision making, whether it's how we grow the business, whether it's compliance reporting or things like lab revenue cycle management and so forth.

We need a lot of data that's buried in different parts of the LigoLab database. For the most part, a lot of the stuff is at your fingertips like test results, stats, and those sorts of things. You can dive in and pull some pretty quick reports and overviews. But sometimes it's not always broken down the way you want by client, client group, or by provider.

That's where the dynamic reports come into play. Like the automations, they're really customizable. You have access, and this is where at first, maybe it's intimidating, but once you learn at what level of the database, what entity things will live at, whether it's the lab or lab test result and so forth, you can get really granular and pull all these same fields into your reports and customize them.

They can be calculated fields. You can then use that to generate, a lot of reports. You might get the staff report you need right out of there and you can use that to look at lab the efficiency of a department or quality control and so forth.

Other times I'm using these to generate customized data tables that I can export out of LigoLab. I write a lot of code that I'll use to further analyze those. One of the most powerful things we've been able to provide to some of our GI clients is adenoma detection rate reporting.

That's really hard for them to do. It's complicated to do it within the CMS guidelines, but by pulling the data out of LigoLab we can help. 

As pathology groups, we only have the data in LigoLab. We don't have the data for everything that we didn't get tissue for, so they send us the data for all their screening colonoscopies, we pulled data out of LigoLab and then I can combine that in a script and spit out their adenoma detection rate per provider. 

They use that to then report to CMS for their own reimbursement. So that's been really powerful. A lot of our dynamic reports, we've wanted things that you can't get from LigoLab as is so LigoLab has been really helpful in building custom data fields for us so that we can do that.

We needed CPT code timestamps for some of our client laboratory billing. There was a little build for us and we can pull that into a dynamic report or direct query the database. There's probably no department in our organization that's not using dynamic reports, and we can usually build for them.

Occasionally they're way out of our league and LigoLab has been able to build them for us. I know Allison's built some custom dynamic reports for us too.

^{Michael Kalinowski}: I think you might've referenced it. Client billing, it's an internal process for Summit Pathology, as I understand, which I think again is a big deal when you think about what type of percentage goes to an outsourced laboratory billing service if you don't have the ability to do it in-house.

^{Corey Handelsman}: Yeah, so we do all of our client lab billing in house. We've been with LigoLab since 2009. So the lab RCM module wasn't a thing back then. Many of you guys might be using that and this example would be not useful necessarily. But if you're not, I'm able to pull all the data I need on every case that was released during our laboratory billing cycle. I can look at that, and I've written scripts to compare what was previously released and then identify all new CPT codes that have been released, and then we can build a technical component on that. I'm pulling in fee schedules from different clients and so forth. 

That's allowed us to track and capture addendums and anything else that might happen after the initial release of a case, preventing duplicate charges and things like that when it comes to client billing. 

We have technical only clients that we bill directly and then we have some clients that we bill globally directly through our client laboratory billing process, because we have agreements with them, or we can just bill for the global. So it's been tremendously flexible in that regard and given us the ability to really track what we're billing for and avoid a lot of the problems.

This is something that did take a lot of custom scripting outside of LigoLab, which is part of what I do. But this is something that used to take days if not a full week to get together. Now this is something I do while I'm drinking coffee in the morning. I just, pull the data out, run a script, and then generate the invoices. 

^{Michael Kalinowski}: Allison, any other examples you might want to bring up about customized reporting? 

_{Allison Still}: Did you want me to share my screen to show dashboard? Yeah, Corey talked a lot about our stats. So stats are like reports that we have built already but if they don’t meet the lab's needs, they can make the dynamic reports that we're talking about, which would be customized for each laboratory. 

And then our third option are these visual dashboards. We've had this feature for a long time. All the widgets are real time data. This is the lab’s production environment and we can do a variety of these widget types right here. We have a double bar graph, this nice pie graph, and maybe just a table here. I think the pathologists haven't started reading out for today because this is a by hour chart, so let's maybe go to like histology, right?

So slide cuts by day of the week and the line is the yearly average and then the bar is today. So yesterday, they were a little above average for Monday. Today, they're a little below, but the day's not over yet. So you can see department-specific trends loaded in here.

The specific dashboards that show up will be specific to the user, right? Maybe when Corey logs in he'll see a different arrangement that's more geared toward what he's interested. The dashboard widgets are mostly scripted in either SQL or JavaScript. So yeah, if you have someone like Corey who is skilled in those kinds of things you can probably really easily make these or otherwise we can make them for you.

^{Michael Kalinowski}: I think you referenced it, but this can be based on the user, correct? 

_{Allison Still}: Yes, it would be unique to each user.

I just set these up to be department-specific tabs because it's representative of what an admin might be interested in, but if you're just a histo tech, maybe you just have one tab and you just add anything relevant to histology. It's entirely user-specific.

^{Michael Kalinowski}: Perfect. Thank you for sharing. We will continue on and discuss the benefits of three-tier laboratory information system software Infrastructure. Some folks out there might not know exactly what three-tier is so in a nutshell, from the LigoLab point of view, the important things to know are improved performance and cost savings.

Now I know that Corey is somebody that has embraced three-tier infrastructure and architecture, and I guess it's already made a positive impact at Summit Pathology. 

^{Corey Handelsman}: Yeah, that's correct. We've noticed a big difference. So this would have been our upgrade to 2023.2. That’s when we really shifted away from what we were doing before. I know there's even more three-tier functionality in the newer versions which we plan to upgrade to toward the end of the year. 

The performance is hard to understate. Before three-tier we had to support an entire remote virtual desktop infrastructure for all of our pathologists. It was costly, resource intensive, and the performance was poor. It also meant that if there was some sort of internet connectivity problem at our headquarters, then the pathologists had trouble to access the laboratory information system software. 

The lab information system took a long time to load. Sometimes there'd be a lot of freezing. And, a lot of this, as many of you might know, was because of internet latency and the performance and the connection stabilities that you have in this type of scenario.

With the three-tier architecture much of this has been offloaded to the server. When you submit a request that requires 200 processes to run it used to be 200 requests had to go back and forth. Now that's all happening on the app server, then it gets sent back to you and that's part of why it's faster. 

Our pathologists are launching LigoLab locally everywhere, in remote parts of Wyoming and all throughout Colorado, and the performance is outstanding to the point where there's no reason to move to another virtual desktop environment now. The huge thing about this is that it’s really beneficial to us as we're now moving to digital pathology and everything's eventually going to be read digitally. 

A third of our pathologists are already credentialed, which means when they're somewhere with a five-hour courier drive. They're getting their slides first thing in the morning instead of having to wait until noon or 1 or 2 p. m. to see their slides. And because of this, LigoLab and the web browser are running on the same desktop locally, it means that when we actually start this project to fully integrate digital pathology with LigoLab, they'll be able to click on a URL in LigoLab when they open a case, launch it in the browser, and have all the power of the local desktop's graphics processor right there available to them.

It would be cost prohibitive to put all that memory into a virtual desktop. They can do this on $500 Mac mini computers, and they have this flawless experience running LigoLab digital pathology, and they're just happy as can be.

^{Michael Kalinowski}: Wow, that's really awesome to hear. 

The importance of the customer vendor partnership. If you've been in the laboratory world for a bit, maybe you've had a bad experience. Maybe your phone calls and emails were not returned. I think we, at LigoLab try to differentiate in this regard. Somebody that I think is excellent at this is Allison.

Allison, you've done it on both sides, right? You worked in a commercial laboratory and now you work for a laboratory information system and laboratory billing/lab revenue cycle management vendor. Can you give us an an idea of how things are with the customer and LIS software vendor’s partnership and what's important in your mind.

_{Allison Still}: Really, in my opinion, there is nothing more important than our relationship with our LIS system and lab billing customers. We really do make the product for them. If it's not the product they want, why would we make it? That's why we do what we do. Honestly, the vast majority of features that we work on are direct requests from our LIS system and lab RCM clients.

A lot of the requests are small. Add a field to the screen, add another different field to this other queue, and so on. But they add up to make a more useful product for everyone. Every ticket that comes in and asks for something that we might not have goes into the pile of things we might do in the future.

We are getting to a place where we are getting around to more of those requests every day. I know it sounds like like a line, but it's true. Every request is important and valid. They all get assessed for how practical they are. We assess how much work it will be and if it makes sense to do it. 

^{Michael Kalinowski}: Regular feedback directly helps shape the product? 

_{Allison Still}: Yeah, that's fair to say. 

^{Michael Kalinowski}: That's wonderful, and a pretty good segue into a Customer Advisory Board. This is something that Allison takes a lead role on. In fact, for LigoLab users out there, we've got a product newsletter that will be going out in a couple of days.

Thanks Allison for that. Can you talk a little bit about the Customer Advisory Board? 

_{Allison Still}: Yeah. We started the board last year and we meet quarterly and I host them. We really are aiming to get representatives from every single one of our clients. During the meetings we talk about what's new and we really just want them to be as interactive as possible. We want to hear what's newly important to our clients. We've been talking about how things change rapidly and how something that was important last year isn't important anymore or else something new has come up that's more important. 

In addition to requests coming in more organically, we wanted to have a more specific time to meet and request this information from our customers so we can keep growing and being relevant for them.

Some notable features that have come out of these collaborations…one is a stats module for sendouts. That was a request from Corey's lab. Another feature set we recently completed was from requests from customers related to prostates. We've been making a lot of improvements to the prostate template and we're going to continue to make more. All the improvements are direct requests, and in this case they are coming from pathologists.

They are the experts in their field. They know what they need to be able to do their job, and we're happy to make those adjustments for them. For example, there's a new diagnostic criteria, I believe it's called Gleason Pattern 4. These are a category of diagnostic cells that are becoming more important for distinguishing between if cancer is more or less severe.

Yeah, we're happy to add in a field for that. Definitely worth it.  

^{Michael Kalinowski:} when using an advanced laboratory information ystem software, sometimes it takes a little research, sometimes it takes a little work to understand the power that you have within that medical LIS system.

Allison, can speak a bit about some of the things that are done by LigoLab to help in that regard? We mentioned the product newsletter. We have regular user group meetings, we have numerous training resources. How important is it to be able to utilize the full power of an advanced LIS system? 

_{Allison Still}: Definitely super useful. I think what Corey mentioned earlier is actually one of the really underrated resources. I think people know it's there, or they like see the question marks in the application, but they maybe don't think about it as a useful resource at their finger tips.

Tthere's a lot in there that can be very useful for even seasoned users like us, right? I find new things all the time that I can take advantage of. 

^{Michael Kalinowski}: all right. I think we've reached the point where we can call out for questions from the audience.

Folks that are listening that might have any specific questions for Allison or Corey, now is the time to submit them via the zoom application. 

I can just kick it off. 

Where is laboratory information system technology headed? I'm wondering, Corey, if you have an opinion that you’d like to share. 

^{Corey Handelsman}: I think that more and more there's going to be mor reliance on not just digital pathology but also a lot of the algorithms that are being developed, and the integrations are going to become crucial.

I think that's where the power comes with the LIS software that's willing to either develop API's or has robust interface teams that can connect to this ever increasing need for access to third party systems. Whether that's your laboratory billing, whether that's for diagnostics, you name it, pulling in and pushing out data, I think that those integrations are going to become key because otherwise, you end up stagnating where you're living in this island and then you have a lot of manual processes that are hard to track and hard to follow. I think that's where the ability to do that is really powerful.

I think that's where I'd like to see the future go is smooth integrations that empower either the users, the admin team, or that has LigoLab or the like publishing APIs to integrate with whatever systems you want. 

Michael Kalinowski: Will this webinar be available to view after this event? 

Yes, Nathan. It will. We’ll post it in our webinars section at LigoLab.com. 

Next one. This was already touched upon just a bit, but do you need a strong IT background to create some of the custom solutions that were mentioned earlier?

^{Corey Handelsman}: Yeah, I can take that. You don't need it. If you don't have it, you might need to be patient because some of the things, they're frustrating because you think you built them right and they don't work. But no, I think you just need patience. That's where using the training environment comes into play. You should be testing and breaking in there all the time to see what doesn't work when you do this and then reverting back.

Once you get the hang of it, they actually are fairly natural to build in the future. So I would say it's not required, but it helps. 

^{Michael Kalinowski}: Next question. How can labs ensure that automated reports are actionable and not just data heavy?

Anyone want to take a stab at that one?

_{Allison Still}: I think they're talking about workflow action queues, reports, automated reports, or more like statistics. I never know when people say reports, which kind of reports they're talking about. There's too many different kinds of reports. So I guess we can ask the attendee to maybe specify and we'll move on to the next one.

^{Michael Kalinowski}: What are the common pitfalls to avoid when setting up automated reporting in a lab environment? 

_{Allison Still}: just thinking of every possible scenario. We always try to get all the logic really ironed out before we start because inevitably when you encounter fringe scenarios you need to know how to handle them. I think that's just something that can be used to avoid any kind of errors in the automation you're setting up. 

^{Corey Handelsman}: Yeah, when you're starting out with this stuff too, I'd say going through all the data fields you need and seeing where they live in LigoLab, I've definitely hit dead ends where I started building something on the lab test results or the microscopic test result and then I figure out, oh, the one field I want is only available on the Microsoft test results CPT member level and I have to start over, right? So looking for those key fields you need will help streamline the process and get you started at the right level. 

^{Michael Kalinowski}: Here's a good question. What area should I search in Confluence to get more information on building the dashboard widgets?

_{Allison Still}: I think if you just search for dashboards it will come up, but, if it doesn't, just reach out to support and we'll be happy to point you in the right direction. The dashboards are a little bit more heavy on the custom, so it's probably a good idea if you want to build your own especially to reach out to us and we can give you some guidance with that, maybe give you some time with our developers and whatever makes sense best for your level of IT experience and what you're looking to do.

^{Michael Kalinowski:} This one is for Allison. Can you give us a high level understanding of the process that goes into the development of new platform enhancements and features? 

_{Allison Still}: Sure. First it is designed. It depends on if the feature is requested for the client or more like internal origin.

If it originates from the client right then we'll do lots of meetings with the client to make sure that we're undertaking the request and then what we're going to do is going to meet that need adequately. The developers will design it. Usually our more senior development architects will design it. If possible, they'll delegate it to the more senior engineers.

Pretty much anything done gets donw extremely quickly. It's when their attention gets divided among many things that things get dragged out. All the development that they push is run through regression scripts, and then after it's finalized, they'll write new QA tests to address that feature.

Once it's integrated, it gets pushed to the test environment. Every client should have a test environment. That's always on what we call integration. The most recent version of the application that developers are working on. Then depending on the feature, someone like myself might do some testing of it.

Then we'll tell all of you guys about it and see if you guys want to upgrade to get the feature. 

^{Michael Kalinowski}: One more for Allison. If somebody would like to become an advisory board member, how would they go about doing that?

_{Allison Still}: There’s a link to join the product newsletter. Otherwise you can just email me if you want. 

^{Michael Kalinowski}: Yeah. And Corey, I believe you are a regular attendee? 

^{Corey Handelsman}: Yes, I am. 

^{Michael Kalinowski}: Okay. How has that benefited you in your work? 

^{Corey Handelsman}: What's been really cool about the these meetings is that we discuss the future of the LIS system application. What ideas there are, and you'll see in real time. There's good dialogue, people upvote them, people shoot them down, and my impression is that helps drive LigoLab’s priorities.

Okay, customers don't want this, or customers do want this, or they want this, but there's other things that are more important. I think to have that voice is very important because let’s face it, the LIS software we use in the lab for most of us is not replaceable. 

You can switch from Microsoft to Google Docs or whatever, and it's a little painful, but but to have that voice, it's pretty impressive, right? You don't get to tell Microsoft or Google what you want to see, and see it actually implemented unless hundreds of thousands of people are saying that.

So it's really powerful. To have a voice and help drive the product development. 

^{Michael Kalinowski}: All right. We appreciate the questions from the audience and the input from both Corey and Allison. 

Corey anything you'd like to say before we finish? 

^{Corey Handelsman}: Just that I really appreciate the opportunity to be part of this. It's been fun working with LigoLab and partnering to enhance our laboratory and work toward better processes.

^{Michael Kalinowski}: Allison. I'll give you the chance for the final word. 

_{Allison Still}: Yes. Thanks everyone for joining. We're so happy to be able to share this all of you. 

^{Michael Kalinowski}: I’ll wrap up by saying we're always interested in hearing from folks out there what they might want to see as part of a future webinar. So certainly you can reach out and let us know your thoughts.

_{Allison Still}: Thank you. 

^{Michael Kalinowski}: Bye guys. Thank you. Awesome job.