Client organisations are entities external to the laboratory that submit specimens for testing. These may include wards or departments within the same hospital as the laboratory, as well as separate organisations such as other hospitals, health centres, clinics, or similar providers.
In SEDRI-LIMS, a client organisation is associated with every specimen, with the possible exception of cases where a specimen is collected locally from a walk-in patient. Even in these cases, however, there is often a referring organisation that can be recorded.
Client organisations can optionally be organised into hierarchies where such structures exist in practice; for example, wards and/or departments can be grouped under specific hospitals. These hierarchies can be defined to whatever depth is useful. A key benefit of modelling such hierarchies is that they enable coarse-grained analytics. For example, to analyse the incidence of Salmonella resistance to a particular antibiotic across a specific client hospital, the hospital can be selected in the client organisation filter, automatically including all child organisations in the analysis. This will work at all levels of the hierarchy.
When enrolling a new user for system access, the user can be associated with either a client organisation or one or more laboratories. Users associated with a laboratory have access to all specimens processed by that laboratory. In contrast, users associated with a client organisation (external users), and granted remote system access, are restricted to specimens sent from, or ordered by, that client organisation.
The processes for adding, editing, and deleting client organisations and their hierarchies are described in the following sections.