The lab keeps the record.
Samples, tests, results and chain of custody stay in the validated system, where they belong. The CRM holds the relationship — the ordering provider, the referral path, the account and the commercial pipeline. We build the boundary between them and the contract that crosses it.
The people selling cannot see the bench.
A lab knows every accession it ran. It usually does not know which provider stopped ordering, which referral source is growing, or which account is one rejected specimen away from leaving. That information exists — it is trapped inside a system nobody is allowed to open for a commercial reason.
The boundary is the contract.
LIMSWhat crosses the line, and what does not.
One integration contract
A written boundary that says which system is authoritative for a sample, a provider, an account and an order, and what happens when the same event arrives twice. The LIMS stays the validated record; nothing on the commercial side is permitted to write back into it.
The ordering provider as a real object
Providers, practices and referral sources modelled in the CRM with the hierarchy the lab actually sells to, not flattened into a free-text field. Volume by provider becomes something an operator can open rather than a query someone runs on request.
Order and result events, not result data
The commercial system learns that an accession was received, held, resulted or rejected — with timing and status, without clinical content crossing the line. That is enough to run a book of business and little enough to keep the boundary defensible.
Rejections and turnaround as commercial signal
Specimen rejections, hold reasons and turnaround drift routed to the person who owns the account, while the case is still recoverable. A provider who quietly stops ordering after a run of bad collections is the form churn usually takes in a lab.
A reporting layer that respects the line
Warehouse models joining operational volume to the commercial record, built so the identifiers cross and the protected fields do not. The board sees volume, mix and provider trend from the same tables the lab trusts.
Map, draw the line, build, validate.
Map
Every field on both sides laid against each other, marked as operational, commercial or protected. The mismatches — provider identity, account hierarchy, what counts as an order — get written down before any code.
Draw the line
The compliance boundary agreed in writing with the people accountable for it, including what never crosses and who signs off on a change. This is a decision, not a configuration setting.
Build
An event-driven integration with logging, backoff and a parked-failure queue a person works through, one-directional into the commercial system by default. The validated environment is treated as read-only unless there is a documented reason it is not.
Validate
Reconciled against a period the lab has already closed, until volume in the CRM matches volume in the LIMS without anyone exporting anything. Then documentation, and a handover the lab's own team can maintain.
Somebody starts exporting a spreadsheet.
No integration exists, so a coordinator pulls a weekly export and sends it to sales. It is stale, it is unaudited, and it carries fields nobody reviewed. The spreadsheet is not a workaround for the missing system — it is the compliance incident, and it is the thing we replace first.
Tell us what leaves the lab by export.
Tell us what you are running
What the system does today, where it breaks, and when it has to work. An engineer reads it — you get an answer inside one business day, not a sequence.