The Sponsor

Ortho Clinical Diagnostics is a global provider of chemistry analyzers for use in hospitals and medical laboratories. These chemistry analyzers run a variety of tests on patient fluid samples, providing physicians with accurate and detailed reports on patient well-being.

The Project

Laboratory Information Systems (LIS) send test orders to connected analyzers and receives completed results in return.

This project extends an existing analyzer’s capability to communicate with the LIS using industry communication standards. These communication standards define the structure of messages between the analyzers and the LIS. One such commonly used standard is known as Health Level 7 (HL7). Unfortunately, HL7 is not explicitly defined; there exist differing implementations among vendors, which have led to interoperability concerns. Laboratory Analytical Workflow (LAW) is a newly adopted standard from IHE and is a specific profile providing vendors a model to which they can conform, thus preventing such concerns.

Team Reactive Healthcare will greatly increase Ortho’s chemistry analyzer’s effective interoperability by adding support for the LAW profile. The team will further improve the system by updating the exchange of orders and results between the LIS and analyzer to work simultaneously over a network connection.

As a stretch goal, Team Reactive Healthcare will demonstrate an implementation of a new use of HL7 known as Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources (FHIR). FHIR uses modern RESTful web API techniques to exchange HL7 messages. The team’s improvements will enable analyzers to be better integrated into hospitals and laboratories worldwide where they will contribute to positive health outcomes.

Domain Model

The Website

The senior project website gives us the opportunity to share our experiences and exhibit our software engineering knowledge.

This website is built with freely available technologies. Jekyll is a static site generator; it helps us create our webpages and blog posts. Google Drive is a file storage service and allows us to serve project documentation and control content access. Most importantly we've developed an easy to manage process, which allows us to focus on the project we create, not the tools.