Laboratories Clinical and Medical
Integrated Quality Management Software - Automate Paper-based Clinical or Medical Laboratory Quality Processes and Comply with CLIA, CGLPs, CGMPs, and Other FDA Regulations
Whether the goal is R&D or medical testing, laboratories play an essential role in the prevention, diagnosis, and treatment of diseases and in the overall delivery of health care. Like other life sciences industries, labs invest heavily in research and development of new technologies. Most of all, labs must ensure the quality, accuracy, and integrity of test results and other laboratory data.
Clinical labs must comply with the Clinical Laboratory Improvement Amendments (CLIA) to be certified to perform testing on human specimens. Labs involved in development of new tests and technologies and in clinical studies also must comply with FDA regulations. FDA-regulated labs maintaining electronic record-keeping systems must comply with 21 CFR Part 11. Public companies or those planning to go public or are acquired by public companies are covered by Sarbanes-Oxley Act (SOX) requirements.
A laboratory's ultimate goal is to ensure the accuracy and quality of tests. To achieve this goal, the lab must address many challenges, including:
- Inefficient Quality System: Labs with multiple facilities and employees in different locations may find it cheaper initially to maintain separate quality systems, especially paper-based or hybrid systems. In the long term, however, these systems are inefficient, requiring tremendous man-hours in terms of routing SOPs and other documentation, obtaining approval and signatures, face-to-face meetings to discuss changes, and manual search and retrieval of documents during inspections.
- Disconnected Processes: Quality processes that are not connected to each other can cause delays and poor results. For example, a change control process that's not connected to customer complaint, CAPA, training, and other quality processes is likely to cause delays in change implementation.
- High Cost of Validation: High Cost of Validation: 21 CFR Part 11 requires computer system validation as a way of ensuring the integrity of electronic records and signatures. Even if a lab successfully automates its manual record-keeping system, it still faces the daunting work and the high cost of validation. Labor-intensive validation tests conducted by internal staff and exorbitant consultant fees can easily double a company's compliance cost.
Compliance is a state, not an event. A laboratory must not only attain compliance, but sustain it year after year. The MasterControl? integrated quality management suite is a configurable, easy-to-use solution that helps companies attain and sustain compliance with FDA and other regulations by automating and managing quality processes in an efficient and cost-effective manner.
Recognizing that validating a software solution ? and keeping it in a constant state of validation ? is half the battle in sustaining compliance, MasterControl is actively developing new ways to reduce the time and effort involved in validating a system and to make it easier to validate software upgrades, both of which are essential in lowering overall validation cost.
Find out how MasterControl can help labs meet CGMP requirements and at the same time increase efficiency and keep compliance costs down. Roll over the list of solution categories below to view the related MasterControl product, then click to go to that solution's product page.
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