Stop Retyping CBC Results: Connecting Your Analysers to the Report
The CBC counter finished the run twenty minutes ago. The result is still on a printout, waiting for someone to type twenty numbers into a report without swapping two of them. Interfacing removes that step — with the technician still in charge.
Walk into the lab of a diagnostic center in Bangladesh and look at the CBC counter. It finished a run twenty minutes ago and printed the result. The result is now a strip of paper on the bench, waiting for the technician to type twenty numbers into the report — and to not swap two of them, and to not put the haemoglobin in the platelet row on the third report of a busy afternoon. Every value that reaches a patient passes through that step. It is the slowest part of turnaround and the commonest source of a wrong number on a report.
The machine already knows how to talk
Almost every analyser sold in the last fifteen years has a port on the back — serial or network — and speaks one of a small number of dialects. Haematology and chemistry machines from Mindray, Sysmex, Roche, Beckman, Erba and Biosystems speak ASTM, an old and well-defined standard. Newer Mindray and Sysmex machines and most immunoassay analysers speak HL7. The cheaper semi-auto chemistry machines — a Humalyzer, a Chem-7 — simply print each result as a line of text to the port. In every case the numbers leave the machine already typed. The only question is whether anything on the other end is listening.
What analyser interfacing actually does
A small program — we call it the Lab Bridge — runs on the PC in your lab, the one that is usually already sitting next to the analyser. It listens on the machine's port, understands what the machine sends, and passes each run up to SihatSuite. There, the run appears in an Analyser Inbox on the Reports page, already matched to the patient's invoice and test, with each value shown beside the reference range and beside whatever was in the report before. The technician looks, and accepts. The report moves to submitted exactly as if the values had been typed — the doctor approves it the same way, it prints the same way, WhatsApp delivers it the same way.
The machine never signs the report
This is deliberate. The values land in a staging area, not in the report, and a person moves them across. A rerun replaces the earlier candidate rather than sitting beside it. A run the technician does not trust is rejected with a reason and kept for audit. Anyone who has watched a clotted sample produce a platelet count of twelve knows why the step matters: interfacing removes the typing, not the judgement.
How the machine knows which patient
This is the part most labs worry about, and it is where most interfacing projects fail. A barcode-reading analyser reads the tube's label and reports the sample ID with the result. So the label has to carry an ID the machine can read — and SihatSuite's existing sample barcode, at twenty-five characters, is longer than many analysers accept. Every tube label now also carries a short lab number, six digits, printed large with its own barcode. A machine with a reader reads it; a machine without one has the technician type six digits into it, which is the same thing they do today on a semi-auto machine's keypad.
Semi-auto machines send no sample ID at all, only a run number. Those runs arrive unbound, and the Lab Bridge shows today's worklist — every tube collected, with its lab number, patient and test — so the technician picks the right one. That binding works with no internet, because the worklist is cached on the lab PC.
Power cuts and dead internet
Every run is written to disk on the lab PC before anything else happens to it. If the internet is down, runs queue and upload when it returns, in order. If the power goes, the queue is still there when the PC comes back. In a Bangladeshi lab this is not an edge case to be handled gracefully; it is Tuesday. The design assumes it.
What it does not do, yet
- It does not tell the machine what to run. Barcode analysers can ask the host which tests were ordered for a tube (a 'host query'); that is planned, not shipped. For now the analyser runs its panel and the inbox keeps the results that were ordered.
- It does not accept results by itself. An option to auto-accept runs where every value is in range is planned for later, once enough labs have run the manual step and we know what it catches.
- It has not yet met your specific machine. The drivers implement the standards those machines use; the first installation at each centre includes capturing what the machine actually sends and confirming every code maps to the right field.
What it costs and how it starts
Analyser Interface is a ৳1,500/month add-on to any SihatSuite subscription with Diagnostic Management, for as many analysers as the centre runs. It is installed by our team on the first visit: we set up the Lab Bridge on your lab PC, connect the machines, map each one's result codes to your report fields, and watch the first real runs land. If your technicians are still typing what the machine already sent, that visit is the whole point.
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