The SMi Group held their annual ELN conference in London last week, under the title ‘ELN: Laboratory Informatics for the 21st Century’. The programme contained a full range of good quality presentations on all aspects of ELNs and related topics that represented the state of the industry. As with most conferences on this subject, there’s not much new to report in the formal programme; its the informal discussions at the breaks that can generate most value. On this occasion, Apple’s announcement of the iPad, midway through the meeting, provoked some discussion about its potential use in the laboratory. The hype cycle is currently in full swing; we await the opportunity to get hands-on to be able to answer the question.
There were a couple of points that did arise in the formal programme that are worth recording. The legal implications of ELNs has been a feature of ELN conferences since they first started. Generally the theme of the presentations has been the reassurance to potential purchasers of ELN systems that electronic records are acceptable in patent litigation and interference cases. There were two presentations in the SMi conference relating to legal issues of ELNs, firstly by Colin Sandercock and then by Matthew Dick (Bristows). Colin’s presentation focused primarily on the situation in the US, whereas Matthew gave an overview of the UK situation, plus some insights into the broader European situation. Surprisingly, there is no harmonization regarding discovery/disclosure relating to electronic records across the European Union.
The most significant message that came from the two presentations was a subtle change of emphasis from ‘it’s perfectly OK to use electronic records in court’ to ‘there are some distinct benefits to using electronic records’. The benefits accrue mainly with the enhanced speed and accuracy of searching electronic records. Since the number of records presented in the discovery phase can be significant, computerised search tools can significantly shorten the time to extract relevant data, and hence reduce costs.
The other presentation that was of particular interest was by Jo Mulgrew of Pfizer. Jo gave a detailed description of the support structure that Pfizer have put in place for a range of laboratory applications. The support system is based on ‘compliance’ of user adoption and uses a range of ‘Enterprise 2.0’ tools during and after implementation to optimise roll out and the on-going user experience of the application. I’m hoping, in due course, to post more details of Pfizer’s approach to in-house support as it seems to represent a benchmark and may offer some best practice ideas to other organisations.
