>>>BTW What is LIS and RIS ??
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>>LIS, probably means Laboratory Information Systems. We have to deal with that when connecting our app to bloodtest analysers.
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>Yes. In our current system (VFP), it talks to 3rd party softwares - SysMex is one of them - to get the actual results of the test from the machine thus eliminates encoding. In .NET development, we'll go directly to the machine provided that it is HL7 compliant. We are having problems with machines which are ODBC compliant only.

AFAIK, Most LIS machines don't talk HL7, but ASTM, which is a protocol specifically developed for this. I know there is middleware that translates between the two.