The Agrihealth Group of companies, a provider of services that directly support the agricultural and food production industries across a number of countries, has purchased a Matrix Gemini LIMS (Laboratory Information Management System) from Autoscribe Informatics. The LIMS will be used by the Group’s veterinary laboratory.
Agrihealth veterinary laboratory is a busy facility based in County Monaghan, Ireland and specialises in the analysis of various types of agricultural and food samples. Much of the analysis carried out is for salmonella and campylobacter for the poultry industry. The laboratory has developed a rigorous set of quality processes which are audited externally on a regular basis.
Agrihealth conducted a thorough evaluation of LIMS from 5 vendors as part of a tender process. Peter Hutchinson, Chief Information Officer at Agrihealth, said: 'We asked for practical demonstrations from all of the vendors to see how they would handle the variety of samples that our laboratory has to deal with. We chose Matrix because of its flexibility, combined with the overall response from Autoscribe. It was quite clear that they understood our specific needs and the requirements of the veterinary process in general. We also received excellent references from existing users.'
Thanks to its configuration tools, Matrix Gemini offers a highly configurable modular and scalable package without the need for custom programming. With full integration of Microchip, Vet XML and VeNOM codes, it provides comprehensive tracking and monitoring of samples from booking-in through testing to result reporting and sample disposal. Since Agrihealth offers other veterinary services, Matrix Gemini provides the flexibility to include additional veterinary processes without needing to rewrite any code. Audit trails, time and date stamping of all actions, version control of all reference data such as test definitions help compliance with regulatory requirements.
Implementation of Matrix Gemini is well under way at Agrihealth. 'The implementation process has gone very smoothly', said Peter Hutchinson. 'We recently attended a 3-day training course at Autoscribe’s headquarters which has been extremely useful.'
