Newborn screening at a public health laboratory
Why a state's newborn screening program needs its own workflow inside the LIMS, not a bolt-on spreadsheet, and what that looks like in practice.
A different clock, a different consequence
Newborn screening runs on a narrower turnaround-time window than most bench work, and a missed or delayed follow-up is not a billing problem, it is a child's outcome. That changes what the software has to guarantee: the specimen cannot silently sit, and an out-of-range result has to reach a follow-up coordinator, not just a queue.
Salus treats newborn screening as its own domain on the same lab-qualified accession model as clinical and environmental work, so a state's newborn screening lab shows up as its own hierarchy node with its own turnaround-time and holding-time rules, not a parallel system someone has to reconcile at month end.
What's actually built
Test Builder lets a program define newborn screening panels and reference ranges the same way any other test is defined, coded to LOINC and SNOMED like everything else in the catalog, so results leave the lab in the same governed ELR/FHIR pipeline as the rest of the network. Multi-tenant/multi-hierarchy support (see the architecture piece below) is what lets a statewide newborn screening lab, its satellites, and the rest of the network operate from one deployment.
We do not claim a purpose-built case-management or dried-blood-spot tracking module beyond what Accessioning and Test Builder provide today. If your program needs bespoke NBS case follow-up workflows beyond specimen and result tracking, say so during procurement so it is scoped honestly rather than assumed.
See it in your laboratory's context.
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