Send a Lab Order Down to the Analyzer

Who / when: the routing is automatic — the physician never touches it — but the lab scientist is the human in the loop who receives the specimen and accessions it so the machine’s answer can find its way home. This page covers what happens to a lab order the moment it’s signed, and the one step the bench does to tie a physical tube to the electronic order. There’s no paper requisition to carry and nobody re-types a test name; the order travels electronically and the barcode is the thread.

When the physician signs a requisition (see Order a Mixed Batch of Labs and Imaging at Once), each lab line is handed to Veona Connect — the device-integration hub that links your analyzers to Veona. Connect looks up which instrument the test is mapped to and sends the order down to it as an electronic service request.

1. Physician — sign the order. That’s the whole physician action. Behind the scenes, Connect routes each lab line to its mapped analyzer over that instrument’s own language — ASTM or LIS2-A (the standard lab-analyzer protocols) or HL7 v2 (Health Level 7, a common healthcare messaging standard). The order now sits in the analyzer’s worklist, waiting for the sample.
2. Lab Scientist — when the tube arrives, open Labs → Accession. The screen is titled Accession Sample: “Receive, barcode, and route a specimen.”
3. Lab Scientist — select the order and the specimen type and container, then accession it. Veona prints a barcode label for the tube. That barcode is the key that lets the analyzer’s result match back to this exact order later.
4. Lab Scientist — print the label with “Print Label” (a PDF) or “ZPL” for a Zebra label printer (ZPL = Zebra Programming Language), stick it on the tube, and load the tube on the analyzer.

Note

Bidirectional vs unidirectional instruments. A bidirectional analyzer accepts the order you pushed down, runs it, and sends the result back up — the full round trip. A unidirectional analyzer can only report results up; it doesn’t take a pushed order, so the scientist runs the test on the instrument directly and Connect still ingests the result by barcode. Veona shows each device’s directionality on its detail in Connect → Devices.

Tip

Every analyzer Veona integrates ships with a true-to-equipment simulator alongside its live link, so connection and operational status on screen reflect a genuinely live state, never a frozen value. Managing those devices, testing a connection, and replaying anything that failed to send is covered in Manage Connected Devices and Retry the Queue.

What happens next

With the order down and the sample on the analyzer, the result comes back up to Connect, which matches it to your accessioned sample by barcode and drops it into the lab worklist for review. From there the scientist verifies and releases it — see Match, Verify and Release an Analyzer Result. If the test is manual or runs on a device-less bench instead, the scientist types the values by hand following Enter a Lab Result by Hand and Release It.

Follow the trail

• Previous: Order a Mixed Batch of Labs and Imaging at Once
• Next: Match, Verify and Release an Analyzer Result
• Related: Send an Imaging Order to the Modality Worklist
• Related: Manage Connected Devices and Retry the Queue