7 Questions with L7: Patrick Rose

by Patrick Rose, Director of Product Management | posted on September 28, 2021

1. What is the biggest pain point of the lab today?

Data silos. Over the years the labs have built up a very complex infrastructure of disparate and sometimes archaic tooling to perform the day-to-day functions of the lab. As these pieces were added, there was no thought on what it would mean to the pieces that were already there, or what pieces would come after it. With this, there was no way to make informed decisions based on the information collected in each of the systems. This is why at L7 we are building a unified platform approach, which allows our customers to break down those silos and make the connections needed.

2. What do you think is the next big opportunity for digital transformation?

I believe it is in the realm of data standards and harmonization with various solutions. Once you have your tools and data coming through a unified platform, allowing those tools to speak in the same language or understand and translate the language of another tool in a standard way, allows all labs, systems, and people to start having an understanding of what goes on where and when in the same way. This ensures, when you start thinking about what is next with the data, you have a common standard.

3. Once you have the data standardized, what is next?

The fun…. Once you have your unified platform, which has broken down the silos and aggregated the data, and have the standards in place which have given you a common language, now you can do something with it. This is where pulling the information together, and utilizing predictive analytics based on tools that use AI/ML, you can build a closed loop system that allows you to feed back and forth to yourself, improvements and optimizations of your lab and science that weren’t possible before you started.

4. What makes L7’s approach different from the competitors?

First, L7|ESP offers a uniquely flexible and customizable unified platform compared to peers’ point solutions – this is unmatched in the industry place today. And our workflow and implementation customization on L7|ESP allows customer-specific solutions. At L7 Informatics, with our pioneering technology, we’re dedicated to our clients’ success and our attentiveness to clients from proof of concept to platform adoption and implementation is best in class. Strategically L7’s deep knowledge across industries is difficult to find with competitors. Over 90% of our implementation team members have Ph.D. or Master’s degrees in the very fields we serve.

5. When is the best time to bring in a unified platform?

As soon as you can, while we are working with a lot of large companies to transform their data and their software landscape, the sooner we come in the easier it is. Having a customer come to us earlier, ensures we can help you start with the right process instead of having to repair some of the fractures already in place by having these disparate systems.

6. What is the biggest stumbling block when it comes to digitizing your lab?

Trying to take too big of a bite. You want to evolve your lab by taking a piece-wise approach and having a platform work with your lab and slowly update individual pieces as they make sense. Doing this allows you to get past the inertia stage while faced with such a large undertaking, and allows you to start connecting your ecosystem one by one until you have digitalized your lab.

7. Why is automation so important in digitizing the lab?

Automation benefits the lab in various different ways. One of the most important is reducing human interaction with the tasks. The benefit of this is three-fold: one, it increases the quality of the data by reducing error prone manual steps. It also helps to optimize the lab, if the scientists don’t need to spend the time on laborious manual steps they can focus on the science and moving it forward. Finally, it increases the performance of the lab by allowing the flow of results and data faster and more efficiently.