LIMS - OpenSpecimen
Emory's Office of Information Technology (OIT) Laboratory Solutions team supports the OpenSpecimen application as part of Emory's enterprise-wide Bio-Banking infrastructure.
OpenSpecimen is a HIPAA-compliant, web-based biobanking platform that streamlines the process of sample management, primarily collected and tracked for research purposes. It provides a central location for researchers to enter, track, and retrieve data for the collection, storage, quality assurance, reporting and distribution of biospecimens. OpenSpeciman is a flexible and easy to use application geared toward cost saving and short implementation time. The implementation of OpenSpecimen at Emory is intended for investigators and laboratory staff to be able to configure and manage most autonomously, with support available from the OIT Laboratory Solutions team if needed.
Key Features and Benefits
- Disease or study-based annotations and longitudinal study support
- Specimen and participant centric protocols with tracking of sample lifecycle events
- Informed consents
- Planned and unplanned biospecimen collections
- Kit management
- Storage and inventory management
- Barcode label generation and printing
- Specimen requests and distributions
- Supply management with customizable alerts
- Shared Web-based specimen catalogs with collaborators
- Configurable dashboards and queries
- Custom fields and forms
- Shipping management and tracking
- Bulk upload of data in CSV files
- Google-style search tool
- Group/site security
- Role-based security
- Complete audit trail
- HIPPA compliant
- Web based
- Servers are hosted in climate controlled, physically secure server operations center with 24 x 7 monitoring and environmental sensors and controls.
- Network segmentation and firewalls to restrict access to the database
- Complex passwords required for system access
- Nightly backups - All backups are encrypted and with a rotating cycle of media stored off-site in case of a disaster
- All servers are patched on a regular basis and have anti-virus software scanning