What is a LIMS for public health? A buyer's glossary

LIMS (Laboratory Information Management System): the software of record for a laboratory's specimens, tests, results, and reports - the system a director is accountable for at survey. A public health LIMS additionally has to speak the state and federal reporting standards a commercial clinical LIMS never needs to.

Accessioning: registering a specimen into the system with an identity, a domain (human, animal, or environmental), and a chain of custody, before any test result exists. ELR (Electronic Laboratory Reporting): the standardized HL7/FHIR feed that sends laboratory results to a state health department or the CDC. LOINC and SNOMED CT: the coding vocabularies that let a test and its result mean the same thing across every system that receives them, rather than a free-text string a receiving system has to guess at.

Test Builder: the screen a lab uses to define its own tests and acceptable results, coded to LOINC/SNOMED, without waiting on a vendor release. Community Registry: a versioned, shared catalog of test definitions and workflows other labs have published, so a lab can adopt proven configuration instead of building every test from a blank page. Human-supervised AI persona: software (Conrad, in Salus's case) that drafts and validates work - it never independently transmits a result, signs a report, or declares an outbreak.