[Idea and practice with the systematization of clinical laboratory in the Central Laboratory, Osaka University Hospital].

On 1 September 1993, we left our old hospital and moved to our brand new establishment, and at that time we adopted the order-entry and reporting system. In this paper we report on our new laboratory computer system that has been developed to manage a lot of information and to analyze rapidly many test tubes (4000 samples per day) and to elevate the service for our patients. We developed the automated clinical laboratory system and this new system was named as the Clinical Laboratory Supervised System (CLASSY). We used the NEC system 3500 Model 10, NEC N5200 Model 03 sx and NEC PC9821 Ae as a laboratory host computer, an interface unit and a terminal for routine work, respectively. CLASSY covers the automated analysis not only for clinical chemistry, but also for hematology, urinalysis and microbiology. As the ordering and reporting system is applied to the hospital information system, order information for clinical test is transferred to our laboratory host computer when the bar-code label is printed out from the automatic bar-code labeller. Then it is transferred from the laboratory host computer to some subsystems or automatically to an analyzer through the interface units or modems.