Laboratory Information System for Kenyan Facilities
Order to result without paper: barcode sample tracking, turnaround times you can actually see, and critical results that have to reach a named human.
What’s included
- Orders raised from inside the consultation, arriving in the lab instantly
- Barcode sample labelling and chain of custody from collection to result
- Turnaround time tracking per test and per stage, not just end to end
- Critical results board with escalation until a named clinician acknowledges
- Reference ranges by age and sex, with automatic flagging of abnormals
- Results attached to the patient record and released to the ordering clinician
- Quality control logging and analyser result capture
A laboratory's failure modes are rarely analytical. The assay is usually fine. What goes wrong is logistical and communicative: the sample that was collected but never received, the result that was produced but never seen, the critical potassium that was filed correctly and read by nobody.
An LIS is worth having to the extent that it closes those gaps.
Order to result, without a paper requisition
The order is raised inside the consultation and arrives in the lab immediately. No requisition form to carry, lose, or misread. The sample is labelled with a barcode at collection, and every subsequent handling is scanned — so at any moment the question "where is that sample?" has an answer that is not "somewhere between here and the lab".
Turnaround, broken down
One end-to-end turnaround number tells you the lab is slow but not why. Tracking each stage separately tells you where the time actually goes, and in our experience it is usually not at the bench. It is the specimen waiting in a rack for the collection round, or the result sitting validated but unreleased.
You cannot fix a stage you cannot see.
Critical results have to reach somebody
This is the part most systems get wrong, because filing a result feels like delivering it. It is not.
A critical result goes onto a board and stays there. It escalates until a named clinician acknowledges it, and the acknowledgement records who and when. If nobody acknowledges, it escalates further rather than quietly ageing. When a case is reviewed months later, the question "who was told, and when" has a documented answer instead of a recollection.
Reference ranges that know who the patient is
Abnormal flagging uses reference ranges appropriate to the patient's age and sex, because a haemoglobin that is normal for an adult male is not normal for a six-year-old. Flagging against a single adult range generates noise, and noise is how a real abnormal gets scrolled past.
Standalone or part of the hospital
The module runs on its own for an independent laboratory — its own registration, billing and result delivery — or as part of the full hospital management system, where an order raised in a consultation and a result returned to that consultation are the same object rather than two systems agreeing to talk.
If you are evaluating options, our guide on choosing a laboratory information system in Kenya covers what to test during a demo.
Frequently asked questions
- What is a laboratory information system?
- A laboratory information system (LIS) manages the path a specimen takes from the moment a clinician orders a test to the moment the result reaches them: order entry, sample labelling and tracking, result entry or analyser capture, validation, and release to the patient record. Its job is to make sure the right result is attached to the right patient and that somebody sees it.
- Can a standalone laboratory use AfyaConnect without the full hospital system?
- Yes. The laboratory module runs on its own for independent labs, with its own patient registration, order entry, billing and result delivery. If the lab later joins a hospital deployment, the existing records carry over rather than starting again.
- What happens to a critical result out of hours?
- It goes onto the critical results board and escalates. A critical result is not considered delivered because it was filed — it stays open, and keeps escalating, until a named clinician acknowledges it. The acknowledgement is recorded with who and when, which is the part that matters when the case is reviewed later.
- Does it connect to our analysers?
- Results can be captured from analysers rather than typed, which removes the transcription error that manual entry inevitably introduces. What is possible depends on the specific analyser and its interface, so this is scoped per site during onboarding rather than promised in the abstract.
- How do we know if the lab is slow?
- Turnaround is tracked per stage — collection to receipt, receipt to result, result to release — not just as one end-to-end number. That distinction matters, because "the lab is slow" usually turns out to be a specific stage, and often it is the specimen sitting in a rack waiting for collection rather than anything happening at the bench.