By Jason Hagerman

With sales of tablet computers expected to double to 70 million units in 2012 from 45 million in 2011, tablets are quickly turning from a fad to a part of daily life for many North Americans.

“Every single day, we get a new, unique experi•ence as consumers that differs from the experience when we’re at work using enterprise systems,” said Citrix CEO Mark Templeton at the Interop 2011 IT Conference and Expo, “and as the gap grows, the pressure to evolve gets greater.”

Lab facilities are slow to adopt technology, but the quick adop•tion of technology in the personal lives of lab workers ensures that newer consumer technology like tablets and cloud computing will influence lab operations.

Tablets
“Tablets are a transformational technology,” says Steve West, senior director of product management at Research in Motion, manufacturer of the Blackberry smart phone and Playbook tablet. “In terms of productivity, in terms of workflow management, in terms of secure document recovery, creation and multi-party collaboration around a single document, tablets are amazing bits of technology.”

Tech companies like Apple, RIM, Samsung, HP and Sony offer tablet variations, each with its own claims of superiority. Words like “lightweight,” “durable” and “intuitive” get tossed around a lot in advertisements.

Which tablet is best in the lab? That depends. If a lab technician needs portability, RIM’s Playbook is the smallest unit on the market and fully supports Adobe Flash. Apple’s iPad is the king of applications, with more than 65,000 iPad-only applications and at least 350,000 total applications, thousands of which focus on human health. Hewlett-Packard’s Slate tablet has real-life experience.

“The unit has been designed into a couple specialized ambulances and an emergency helicopter,” says Brian McCarthy, category manager for business notebook products at HP. “It’s used as a principle device for imaging and communicating during transit. Information, including video, is relayed in real time to the hospital.”

In March, Classico, a designer of stylish lab coats, launched a lab coat with an internal tablet pocket, the first of its kind.

The tablet device, says Wally Kowal, President and Founder of Canadian Cloud Computing, will encourage a shift to cloud computing, a form of computing that puts the organization’s software and data on a virtual hard drive accessible from anywhere, rather than being saved on a local hard drive.

“If you have a central datastore, it’s more accessible with a tablet you can just carry with you anywhere,” he says. “It’s not tied up on a disk drive in a machine in the back of the lab. If that information is on the cloud, you can get at it from anywhere with the tablet.”

Said West at the Interop conference: “It is really clear that we’re moving from the PC era to the cloud era.”

The cloud
Clouds—either private, like Microsoft’s corporate offerings, to public cloud services available through Google—are accessible through a web browser. Rather than buying software and equipment outright, a significantly expensive task for cash-strapped labs, users pay a monthly fee to use software and storage facilities through the cloud.

“Clients use the cloud for straightforward spreadsheets or [word processing operations],” says Kowal. “They also use it for manipulating large data sets which, for a cloud, is a simple thing to do. For a lab to buy the servers to manipulate the data, maintain them, run them and keep them cool, that’s not a good allocation of money. Chances are the servers will even sit there idle half the time.”

On the cloud platform, if a lab needs extra computing power, it’s available. If not, the lab doesn’t pay for it. Canadian Cloud currently works with a group of medical researchers conducting clinical trials.

“They have information they need to respect and commercial security they need to maintain,” says Kowal. “In this industry, the rule is you get what you pay for.”

Amazon.ca offers low-cost cloud services. In April, the ser•vice crashed, knocking out several high-traffic websites and, according to Business Insider, per•manently destroyed customer data.

For some, reliability and security come second to cost. Scientific industries, Kowal says, can’t afford to risk data destruction.

“We’re working right now with a major medical imaging company to provide access through the cloud to medical imaging databases,” he says. “Labs in universities or hospitals generate massive amounts of data, and they could be sharing these things. Ideally, the data could be situated on private clouds but attached to a public cloud for times when more power is needed.”

The paperless lab
“Can you think of a business environment where it would benefit you to have a typewriter instead of a computer?” asks Steve Bolton, marketing manager with Labtronics, a company that digitizes lab processes.

Paper, Bolton believes, is a relic in the lab as it is in the business world. Digital technology, he says, increases productivity and saves labs money.

A 2006 study from the Delphi Group, a Boston-based business consultancy, declared that 15 per cent of all paper handled in business is lost and 30 per cent of all employee time is spent retrieving documents. Coomer and Lybrands, an accounting firm, concluded from a study that U.S. compa•nies spend about $20 in labour to file a document, $120 in labour to find a misfiled document and $220 to reproduce a lost document.

In the business environment, a sheet of paper that costs .003 cents to purchase ultimately costs 4.47 cents by the time it is disposed of.

“Within the lab, additional factors need to be accounted for when using paper,” says Tom Curtis, vice president of product innovation at Labtronics.

Paper becomes expensive for a variety of reasons, including inaccurate or illegible data recording, long term storage requirements due to regulatory and legal requirements, and extensive investigation or rework when forms are lost or damaged and physical transportation of documents by lab technicians through the approval process.

“With an electronic system, the lab worker is forced to complete tasks in a specific order and requires values entered into data fields to adhere to a specific format,” says Curtis.\

Electronic systems also assist with accountability and workflow.

In a fully integrated system, Labtronics can program checks and balances on every item through a process. In a paperless environment, the system can control who has access to what equipment. It can ensure appropriate value ranges for test results and provide accountability at every step of a process.

A sample for chromatography analysis arrives in the lab. The technician logs the sample in to the system, triggering a digital checklist for chromatography analysis. A digital worksheet opens in Labtronics’ Electornic Laboratory Notebook software, walking the technician through sample preparation. Once complete, the electronic notebook software green lights the analysis. The chromatography data system runs the test and feeds results back to the electronic notebook and the laboratory LIMS.

“A lab can bulk that up with even more automation and integration,” says Curtis. “The sample prep might integrate with a balance or PH meter or other reagents or chemicals. Part of the process is to verify those instruments are calibrated properly and the reagents are worthy of being used.”

Today, the paperless lab is within reach of any facility.

“Traditionally it’s been looked at as an intensive process,” says Bolton. “With today’s technology, the timeframe is not what you’d think. A deployment with the sample tracking, electronic notebook, chemical tracking and instrument interface can be done in five-weeks.”

The real cost of paper
How does a .003 cent piece of paper cost a lab more than four cents by the end of its life? Paper is used for photocopying, printing, faxing and mailing. A small portion is lost. Photocopying and printing costs 3 cents per page, including equipment costs (toner, maintenance, and so on). Faxing raises per-sheet cost to 4 cents. Mailing, including courier costs, envelopes, postage, can total 60 cents or more. Storage adds to overhead costs. Filing cabinets, space and mass-disposal contribute to a cost of .0167 cents per sheet of paper in storage. An average workplace, spending $30,000 on paper annually, will pay $447,000 in related costs, according to RCC Consulting.