Accessioning that names the lab, the specimen, and the pick

A public health lab does not accession one way. Walk-ins, lockbox bags, hospital electronic orders, submitter spreadsheets, and QR forms all have to become the same kind of record. Salus keeps a single accession writer. Manual entry, Excel, CSV, JSON, and mapped ETOR orders all call it. Nothing silent becomes a specimen.

File ingest is a gateway, not a side door. The file is parsed, columns are mapped, rows are validated against the live catalog, and a tech previews the first page before commit. Legacy .xls is rejected with a save-as-.xlsx message. Preview never writes. Commit uses the same validation and PHI encryption as a single walk-in.

Every lab has a unique identifier with no dots in it. The printed accession is that lab ID, a 10-digit specimen number (four-digit year plus a six-digit sequence), and a four-digit pick: FLAG.2026000001-0001. Sequence is tenant-wide per year. The lab ID is what makes federation lineage visible without a join.

A pick is a lab order on that parent. Sequences run 0001 through 9999 and are never reused after cancel, even if the order was only drafted. Environmental work can still split into aliquots; the parent accession stays the identity the network recognizes. Scan-first barcodes resolve the lab-qualified ID, the pick, an order, or a storage location.

Every specimen is human, animal, or environmental, with a matrix code (blood, wastewater, soil) and animal fields when they apply. Holding-time rules are matched from most specific to least: test plus matrix, then test, then matrix, then domain. The clock starts at collection, not at receipt, and the pick shows ok, at-risk, or expired before the run starts.

Inbound referrals land pending verification. Ten physical checks have to be marked: identity match, label intact, integrity, volume, stability, order complete, collection data, insurance, external accession, and transport. Pass is allowed only when no check failed. Accept with exception requires a written justification. Fail requires a rejection reason. A QR scan does not receive the tube. Sealed custody handoff is a different path; this gate is the receiving tech's eyes on the bag.

The Features matrix lists each of these under Accessioning and intake, with a lab-tech column and a buyer column. Laboratory management on the product page is the long form. The live demo is app.salusagentic.com/Demo (demo / demo). Engineering detail, including the format helpers and the one-writer rule, lives in the accession intake spec in the project docs.