Long-term data storage in a clinical laboratory information system.

The clinical laboratory is pressured on one side by physicians and regulators who want the laboratory to keep more detailed patient records available for longer periods and on the other side by physical space and cost constraints which favor rapidly transferring such records to Medical Records or a warehouse from which retrieval is slow and difficult. Various forms of inactive data storage and archiving in machine-readable form are available to address this dilemma, yet these solutions can create even more difficult problems. Two different approaches were developed within the framework of Relational LABCOM to address both the intermediate and long-term storage of data. In this paper we examine the two methods as solutions to the problems, discuss their limitations, and determine why one is superceding the other in the installation base.