Evaluating Generalizability of a Biospecimen Informatics Approach: Support for Local Requirements and Best Practices

To enable clinical and translational research, academic medical centers increasingly implement biospecimen information management systems. At our institution, one laboratory successfully implemented a multi-system solution that enabled collection and reporting of specimen- and aliquot-level data. The objective of this study was to assess the solution against the laboratory’s requirements and with respect to support of best practices for biospecimen information management systems defined by the International Society for Biological and Environmental Repositories (ISBER). The solution supported the laboratory’s reporting needs and 90% (n=26) of ISBER best practices. To the best of our knowledge, this is among the first studies to demonstrate the generalizability of a biospecimen informatics approach. Findings suggest that development and evaluation of biospecimen informatics approaches can potentially improve through closer collaboration of informatics and biorepository professional societies.