Lab GPS™ is the first fully cloud-based offering from Data Innovations, built to improve uptime with lab connectivity monitoring, control, and notifications. Offered to all direct Instrument Manager™ connectivity customers, Lab GPS brings the power of our industryleading vendor-neutral solution outside the four walls of the lab and enables users to monitor, stop, start, and resolve connection issues even when they are off-site.

Lab GPS is powered by Instrument Manager™ Connectivity, offering 1 000+ instrumentdrivers. With Lab GPS, you can monitor all of your instrument connections – even while you’re remote. Email notifications, single sign-on, and a fully cloud-based web-app enable full monitoring and connection restart abilities, even while away from the lab. More lab uptime, less IT burden, and improved patient care are all made possible with Lab GPS. Now with Lab GPS v2.1, a new mobile app enables even easier access for connectivity monitoring and control while you are on the go.

Lab GPS features include:

• Single drilldown dashboard monitoring of all lab sites, test systems and instruments with color-coded alerts to designate any connectivity disruptions
• Email notifications and in-app alerts of downed connections
• The ability to stop and start IM connections and comm traces for LIS and instruments remotely, including low-volume and batch instruments – a feature especially helpful with the joining of multiple networks during a merger or acquisition
• At-a-glance view of your lab’s performance with Specimens Held and unreleased Critical results
• The ability to switch instruments between test and production when Lab GPS is connected to both the test and production systems.
• Role-based connectivity monitoring based on user role, which may be specified by lab or site-monitored
• Mobile app access to enable easier troubleshooting and resolution of connectivity challenges
• An audit log that records user actions of connection starts and stops, and whether they were sent from the web or mobile app

Our Lab GPS mobile app was designed specifically for customers that take calls after-hours, juggling work responsibilities with family life. The mobile app brings the ability to monitor, start and stop IM, LIS and instrument connections utilizing cellular data if wi-fi is not available. Connections are organized for quick sorting, making it easy to monitor all lab connections. In addition, the status of IM’s High Availability and Disaster Recovery system may be viewed. As with the Web app, a red alert is displayed so that attention is drawn immediately to connections with connectivity issues.

When an alert has been triggered, a bell appears in the banner allowing the LIS admin/analyst to click and immediately filter only the instruments at the site that triggered the alert. Downed connections can be easily restarted with a single-toggle switch. In addition to restarting connections, LIS admins can easily turn on a comm trace if more complex troubleshooting is needed, allowing the raw data to be collected before logging into their IM system.

Including the IM test system with Lab GPS allows the LIS admin to toggle between test and production while testing without a laptop or PC. This can save time when changing or updating instruments or when troubleshooting cabling issues.

The Lab GPS mobile app was created specifically for users that take after-hours calls or may often be away from their desks. The app provides the same monitoring, information and actions as the web app, but all configurations of Lab GPS are performed on the web app.

Lab GPS helps IT staff reduce lab downtime through single-platform monitoring and notifications for all LIS instances, sites, and instruments connected to Instrument Manager.

In a typical downtime occurrence, a laboratorian reports a connection outage to IT after some time has lapsed and production has stalled. A ticket is submitted to IT, who then spend time investigating and restarting the connection. Meanwhile, the lab loses valuable production time, delaying the delivery of important test results to patients and their doctors. LIS downtime is not only costly, but it can also lead to manual transcription errors and compromise patient care.

With Lab GPS, IT administrators are notified immediately via email of any connectivity disruptions. Through single-sign-on access, they can log into their system remotely and securely through any device with web access and see precisely which LIS instances, lab sites and instruments are flagged for connectivity disruptions. In certain cases, they can even perform a stop-start command to get production quickly running again. The instant notifications and monitoring alerts from Lab GPS can save substantial downtime while enabling IT administrators to resolve connectivity issues more quickly and free them up to get back to their normal daily workload or busy lives at home, after hours.

Lab GPS has several parameters you can use to create alerts and send email notifications:

• Connection status – alerts can be set when a connection status does not appear normal
• Last transaction threshold – alerts can be set when a connection has not had any traffic for a defined amount of time
• Holiday exclusions – Holidays may be included in the configuration set up so that last transaction alerts are disregarded when a laboratory is closed.

An ideal setup for ensuring optimal downtime recovery and data protection is to have Lab GPS installed alongside Instrument Manager’s High Availability & Disaster Recovery solutions. While Lab GPS will notify you of any disrupted connections, the High Availability & Disaster Recovery solutions will ensure backup failovers with no data loss.

If Instrument Manager goes down due to a hardware, power or software issue, Instrument Manager will automatically trigger a fail-over to an internal mirrored server through IM’s High Availability service. For catastrophic outages affecting multiple lab sites, the Disaster Recovery service can provide a manual failover to an off-site server, enabling rapid operational and data recovery by IT. In both cases, labs are protected from losing any data, and manual lab orders can still be entered through Instrument Manager. Lab GPS can be used as a tool for convenient visibility of the High Availability and Disaster Recovery servers’ status.

Lab GPS is currently available in the US only. It may be offered in other regions in the future.

No hardware is required to access Lab GPS. It is a cloud-based product hosted by Data Innovations on Amazon Web Services (AWS).

Yes, the web app controls the connectivity to Instrument Manager and the security/permissions through Active Directory for Lab GPS. This must be set up before using the mobile app.

A driver is loaded on to Instrument Manager and a connection is configured for the customer’s individual tenant. The connection to Lab GPS is included in the price of the subscription.

First, Lab GPS contains no personal health information (PHI). The data stored within our backend infrastructure is secured through encryption, vulnerability scanning, detection response, security policies, security training, and access control mechanisms. During transit, all data is encrypted using the highest level of encryption available. Firewalls inspect ingress and egress traffic to Lab GPS. Our APIs utilize input validation, strong authentication, and authorization. All data is stored within the USA.

Single Sign-On (SSO) access is required for the mobile application. Security of the mobile app is ensured through Transport Layer Security (TLS 1,2), which enables encryption for data communication over a network. To use the Lab GPS app, mobile devices must use TLS 1,2. The mobile app can be easily disabled by an administrator if security practices do not allow mobile applications. 

Furthermore, the security of Lab GPS has been confirmed by DI receiving a SOC 2 report with no findings for this cloud-based product. Visit our Trust Center for more information.

The mobile app was validated with iOS version 15 and version 16.

The mobile app was validated with Android version 12 and version 13.

Yes, Lab GPS is offered as a one-year and three-year subscription based upon the number of Instrument Manager connections. Three-year subscriptions are offered at a discounted price.

Yes, the mobile app is included in a Lab GPS subscription at no additional charge.

The mobile app is available for download from the Google Play Store and Apple Store.

Lab GPS will automatically be added to your quote for new connections. The cost will be pro-rated to the point in time in which the new connection is added to your subscription.

Yes, Lab GPS allows you to connect to multiple direct IM systems and view the status of all IM connections from a single Lab GPS instance.

Yes, this is a great way to begin using Lab GPS on a smaller scale.

At this time, we do not offer that purchase arrangement.