Clinical and Laboratory Standards Institute document LIS02-A2—Specification for Transferring Information Between Clinical Laboratory Instruments and Information Systems; Approved Standard—Second Edition addresses the two-way digital transmission of remote requests and results between clinical laboratory instruments and information systems. It enables any two such systems to establish a logical link for communicating text to send result, request, or demographic information in a standardized and interpretable form.

The revisions in this version of the LIS02 standard are intended to delineate this document from the former ASTM version of this standard. The title and text have been revised throughout to indicate that this standard applies to medical laboratory instruments. The term computer has been replaced with the term information to better reflect ?current terminology (ie, laboratory information system or LIS).

This standard covers the two-way digital transmission of remote requests and results between medical laboratory instruments and information systems. It is intended to document the common conventions required for the interchange of clinical results and patient data between medical laboratory instruments and information systems and specifies the message content for transferring information between a medical laboratory instrument and an information system. It enables any two such systems to establish a logical link for communicating text to send result, request, or demographic information in a standardized and interpretable form. 

This standard does not necessarily apply to general analytical instruments in an industrial analytical setting, or to a research and development setting. This standard is intended to apply to the structure of messages exchanged between medical laboratory instruments and information systems by defined communications protocols. Low-level communications protocols and data transfer requirements are beyond the scope of this standard. A separate specification is available detailing a standard for low-level data transfer communications (see CLSI document LIS1—Standard Specification for Low-Level Protocol to Transfer Messages Between Clinical Laboratory Instruments and Computer Systems). 

This standard specifies the conventions for structuring the content of the message and for representing the data elements contained within those structures. It is applicable to all text-oriented clinical instrumentation. It has been specifically created to provide common conventions for interfacing computers and instruments in a clinical setting. It would also apply to interfacing instruments in clinical practice settings, such as physician offices, clinics, and satellite laboratories. The intended users of this standard are developers of medical laboratory information systems and medical laboratory managers.