Haga Hospital laboratory extends contract with Clinisys for 10 years 

The Haga Hospital in The Hague (The Netherlands), and Clinisys have been working together for 20 years. And the hospital intends to continue this cooperation for quite a while: in July, it signed a new framework agreement with Clinisys for another 10 years. But this doesn’t mean that everything will remain the same. In fact, a lot is going to happen over the next two years. As a first step, the laboratory is planning to upgrade its GLIMS Laboratory Information System (LIS). Then, it will connect a new laboratory and completely redesign the LIS. 

Long-term collaboration

„I believe we were one of the first laboratories in the Netherlands with GLIMS,“ says Maurice Out, ICT Laboratory Coordinator at the Haga Hospital. „Over the years, this installation evolved along with our healthcare organization. For instance, Haga has taken over several other hospitals, and we have been able to smoothly integrate their respective laboratories, even though there were sometimes different ways of thinking. This was possible thanks to the extensive functionalities of GLIMS. You really can do anything with it.“  

Today, around 350 Haga employees work with GLIMS. The system is used in all laboratories – clinical chemistry, microbiology, hematology – and even in the pharmacy. Only pathology has its own system. The orders from the first line care providers come in digitally via Zorgdomein, those from the second line care providers come in via the electronic patient record (EPR). To enable result consultation, Haga Hospital has the latest version of CyberLab, which is mainly used when the EPR is not available.  

Indispensable functionalities and excellent support

In July, Haga Hospital decided to extend its partnership with Clinisys for another 10 years. „GLIMS has a number of functionalities that we don’t want to miss. For example, the clinical laboratory scientists find the QC module to be very well designed. The transfusion module and connectivity with third-party software are also reasons to choose GLIMS,“ says Maurice.  

Another factor in the choice is the collaboration with Clinisys, which, according to Maurice, runs smoothly across the board: „We have been working with the same people for a long time. This familiarity makes it much easier to communicate. Furthermore, Clinisys thinks together with us. We look for solutions jointly, for example how we can approach things regionally in the event of a merger. This is important to us.“  

Haga’s laboratory has quite a lot of in-house GLIMS expertise: „We can handle many things ourselves, but if we have any questions, we can count on excellent response times. The fact that we report so few issues shows how well the system is running.“  

Maurice is also positive about Clinisys‘ training offer: „New employees always receive the basic training. We also follow more advanced and specific training courses, recently for example, on invoicing and the new GLIMS 10 functionalities. These training sessions often take place on-site, which we like.“  

Future plans 

The laboratory at Haga Hospital now has the green light to upgrade to GLIMS 10. The servers will be delivered soon, and then the installation will start. The new LIS should be in production by the summer.   

But there’s more to come. Haga Hospital also has a new location in Zoetermeer. This means that from October onwards, it will integrate the laboratory’s diagnostic activities (which are still currently carried out at the Reinier de Graaf hospital), and connect them to the central GLIMS environment. For Haga, this is an ideal opportunity to redesign the GLIMS. „Then we’re going to redefine everything, and rebuild the database. Materials, labels, procedures, you name it… That will take about 15 months. So it’s going to be quite busy in the near future!“ concludes Maurice.