Pardini Group Clinical Lab sees 30% Performance Boost with Rollout of InterSystems IRIS for Health Data Platform

When you’ve been running a marathon in first place for a while, you start looking back to see who’s coming at you. And you wonder if you’ll have the breath or the legs to meet the challenge and stay ahead.

The Pardini Laboratory Group (now part of Grupo Fleury) has been the leading clinical laboratory in Brazil for 20 years. Today, Pardini is one of the 3 largest reference laboratories in the world, processing 16 million tests per month. Ninety-four percent of those tests are automated, and Pardini delivers 92% of results within 6 hours. A partner for 7,000 other labs serving 2,100 communities across Brazil, Pardini’s transport fleet travels nearly 50,000 miles per day moving samples to testing sites. “For all of this to happen we need a lot of technology,” said Joao Alvarenga, CIO at Pardini. “Our main and most important technology partner is InterSystems. Without them we would not be where we are today.”

Pardini began its race to the top years ago when it developed its laboratory information system (LIS) on an InterSystems platform. Pardini uses the LIS to manage front office services and run the back-end laboratory sample processing environment. “This system runs non-stop with about 5,000 users a day around Brazil,” Alvarenga said. “We’ve built our business on it, so you can imagine how risky it felt to change the database platform beneath it.”

Pardini could have chosen not to make any changes. After all, why change something that works well? But to continue in first place, Pardini must nearly double its business to process 30 million tests per month. The company needs new capabilities and higher performance in its IT systems to make this possible. “We deeply evaluated InterSystems IRIS for Health™ and concluded that it is a superior product for us, delivering gains in scalability, performance, and reliability. A wide range of programming languages to use, including Python, makes it easier to hire the talent we need.”

Based on its evaluation, Pardini decided to migrate its LIS to InterSystems IRIS for Health, a huge step. “This was the largest information technology project in our history,” Alvarenga said. “I have to give credit for its success to the hard work of our team, and also to InterSystems for how they worked with us to ensure that success.” Pardini executed the migration in waves over a 9-month timeframe, with periodic “haulouts” of new capabilities along the way, so that training could be absorbed gradually and effectively over time.

The transition to InterSystems IRIS for Health brought LIS execution speed increases of 25% to 30%. New cloud-native capabilities, plus the ability to inform everyday business processes with insights from analytics and machine learning, will help eliminate constraints on growth. “We can expand operations and services as quickly as needed,” Alvarenga said. “We’re also looking to take advantage of microservices running in the cloud, and greater efficiencies and savings using the cloud to support disaster recovery instead of through our colocation facility.” With the help of InterSystems IRIS for Health, Pardini is pulling further ahead of competitors as it reaches for its goal.