At HIMSS '14, Orchard Software Will Introduce A New Product, An Enterprise-Class LIS Called Orchard Sequoia Adding To Its Award-Winning Suite Of Laboratory Informatics Software

Come see the biggest tree in the Orchard at HIMSS ’14 booth #2283.  At HIMSS ’14 booth #2283, Orchard will showcase its newest lab system product designed for the enterprise-wide laboratory. With the addition of this new information system, Orchard Software provides the most complete package of lab system solutions of any healthcare IT vendor—supporting laboratories of all shapes and sizes in the successful capture and delivery of the valuable currency of diagnostic information.

“With Orchard Harvest LIS, Orchard Pathology, Orchard Copia, and most recently, Orchard Trellis, we have a strong suite of products and are recognized as leaders in the industry with the most decorated software package of the last decade. Our award-winning products meet the needs of most of the market place, but up until now we have not been in a position to serve the largest organizations and laboratories in the country. Today, we’d like to introduce the newest edition to our product line—Orchard Sequoia,” says Curt Johnson, Chief Operating Officer at Orchard Software Corporation.

Orchard Software’s newest product, Sequoia, provides maximum scalability to accommodate the needs of high volume laboratories and support laboratory growth concurrent with the fast-paced changes taking place in healthcare—incorporating much-desired tools to measure performance, improve productivity and efficiency, and generate valuable business analytics.

“We are taking 20 years of knowledge that we’ve gained in the laboratory industry, combined with the latest technology developments, and are producing a new LIS aimed specifically at this market, designed to be scalable and to address the needs of the largest clients. We know that the new healthcare arena requires that your diagnostic system be part of a larger system and that the totality of the solution includes integrating your diagnostic system into the entire network. With Sequoia’s unique architecture, using API and web services to allow other systems access into lab data as well as the lab to access data in other healthcare networks, this provides a clear advantage. As organizations start to wrap their minds around how they can use data in a more global way and begin to integrate big data, we’re there to help; in fact we’re there to start it,” says Rob Bush, President of Orchard Software Corporation.

Mr. Bush continues, “Integrated diagnostic information provided by the laboratory is vital to facilitate diagnostic analytics necessary for the development of treatment pathways that can improve healthcare efficiency, control waste, reduce costs, and improve patient care. As healthcare focuses on overall population health, laboratory data is an integral part of the required clinical information. With Sequoia, users can extract and manipulate data stored in the LIS to generate statistics for analytics using data trends and patterns to provide valuable insight; and use predictive analysis to support the growth and development of their laboratory by creating reports that analyze historical data to impact future decisions.”

“Orchard Sequoia has the tools to measure performance, improve productivity and efficiency, and generate valuable business analytics. Orchard Sequoia’s segmental tiered architecture, structured data framework, rich internet platform, and superior connectivity capabilities are what the leaders in healthcare need to generate and deliver the new currency of healthcare—supporting the front-end of patient-centered care and quality outcomes, while reducing cost,” concludes Henry Oglesby, Executive Vice President of Orchard Software Corporation.

In order to promote preeminent future development of Orchard Sequoia, Orchard Software and Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center (MSKCC) have entered into an agreement that will involve the use of Orchard’s advanced LIS technology to support comprehensive and effective cancer care.

In a collaborative effort focused on progressive, ongoing development of its laboratory informatics products to strengthen and support the future of healthcare, Orchard Software has entered into a long-term agreement with MSKCC to provide state-of-the-art LIS technology and to benefit from MSKCC’s expertise in superior patient care. MSKCC will utilize Harvest and Sequoia to enhance their laboratory efficiencies and interoperability, supporting their patient-centered care focus and intention to make a meaningful impact on cancer treatments around the world.

“Orchard Software is privileged and excited to have the opportunity to partner with such a prestigious facility as MSKCC. And, as a leading LIS in the oncology market, we look forward to being involved in the success of MSKCC’s goal to provide the most advanced cancer treatments available. We are eager to begin working with MSKCC in their conquest against cancer by providing laboratory informatics to aid in the potential development of new and more effective ways to diagnose and treat disease,” says Curt Johnson, Chief Operating Officer at Orchard Software.

 Mr. Johnson continues, “Orchard’s goal is to provide state-of the art LIS technology for the ever-changing healthcare arena—providing the flexibility, decision support, business intelligence, and analytics necessary to sustain and foster improvements in a rapidly changing healthcare environment. Working in conjunction with MSKCC, we believe the collaborative endeavor will enhance and broaden the development of our LIS products and simultaneously support MSKCC’s objective to provide superior individualized diagnostic treatments for patients based on most current evidence.”

 The maximum scalability available in Orchard Sequoia’s three-tier design accommodates the needs of high volume laboratories across multiple locations and departments, including clinical, molecular, anatomic pathology, and microbiology. Sequoia’s application environment is composed of independent software components that exchange information internally within the application.

Orchard Sequoia brings many benefits, including:

The three-tier architecture allows for independent update of a segment of the application without affecting other segments or restarting the entire application. This design generates superior performance in high volume environments. 

Orchard Sequoia utilizes a Microsoft SQL Server 2012 Enterprise Edition database to provide the high volume, high velocity solution, and expanding data that is required by the ever-changing laboratory. Sequoia data can be mined using SQL Reporting Services or Crystal reports without exposing the Sequoia production database.

With Orchard Sequoia, users can extract and manipulate data stored in the LIS to generate statistics for analytics using data trends and patterns to provide insight into population health status and other laboratory business intelligence needs. Ad-hoc reports can track turnaround times, physician utilization, testing volumes, staffing levels by shift, billing data, population data by diagnosis, and more. Sequoia can be used to monitor data by analyte to discover shifts between reagent lot numbers, identify unnecessary or duplicative testing scenarios, or track specific diagnoses or abnormal test results to manage disease populations.

SQL Server AlwaysOn technology offers proven solutions for high availability and disaster recovery. The SQL AlwaysOn architecture combined with Windows Failover Clustering provides a solution to support read-only local replicas and remote hosted Disaster Recovery sites to ensure high availability of the Sequoia Database. With the general availability of SQL Server 2014, Sequoia will support Microsoft’s In Memory Technology that allows optimized tables to reside in memory for read and write activities without relying upon disk reads and writes. This optimization can generate performance improvements of up to 20 times over standard memory architecture SQL databases.

Orchard Sequoia’s deployment model has a “Big Data” component that allows for mining and evaluation of large quantities of unstructured data. This “Big Data” solution will permit the long-term storage of large informational stores that can be mined, examined, and evaluated.

About Orchard 
Orchard Software Corporation (Carmel, IN), founded in 1993, is a leader in the laboratory information system industry and offers a variety of lab system solutions. Orchard’s products are installed in all sizes of multi-site and multi-specialty physician groups and clinics, hospitals, independent reference labs, student health centers, veterinary labs, and public health organizations.  Orchard’s best-of-breed systems provide rules-based decision-support, ICD screening, data mining for analytics, and seamless integration to support point-of-care, clinical, microbiology, molecular, cytology, and anatomic pathology testing.  Orchard also offers a laboratory outreach solution for EHR connectivity and remote access. Orchard serves more than 1,300 laboratories across the country helping them to improve efficiency, reduce errors, and enhance integration. For more information, visit www.orchardsoft.com.