Laboratory Management Integrated Solution within the Animal Health and Food Safety laboratories subordinated to The National Sanitary Veterinary and Food Safety Authority

About ANSVSA

The National Sanitary Veterinary and Food Safety Authority (A.N.S.V.S.A) operates as a regulatory and supervisory authority in the sanitary veterinary and food safety field, and as a specialty body of the central public administration, invested with legal power, under Government’s subordination and under the coordination of the Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Development. The authority mission is accomplished through health protection across the whole food chain – that is in each stage of the production process, from farm to fork – preventing food contamination, promoting food hygiene and clear informing of consumers about food and animal health and well-being.

What was the initial situation?

The 44 laboratories subordinated to A.N.S.V.S.A. recorded most of their tests throughout the whole food chain on paper. Due to the large volume of recordings, the centralization and data retrieval was cumbersome and sometimes almost impossible. There were difficulties in data collecting and reporting at the national level due to the lack of common nomenclatures assisting laboratories “to speak the same language”. When Romania entered the EU, there were also reports to send to the European Authorities, which started to put even more pressure on the people working to gather retroactively the information on paper, sending them then to ANSVSA, which in turn would centralize them and finally report them to EU.

What was the objective?

The standardization of activity within all 44 laboratories which brought a series of advantages:

• Easy adoption of amendments set by institutes and authorities on the document formats used in laboratories (test reports, reception registries, laboratory registries, etc.);


• Implementation in a much shorter period of time of all legislative amendments within the computerized laboratories. E.g.: for updating the test costs, all labs using LIMS system benefited of the new fare second day from its official publication without having to make any modification to the data they were working with (all data updated automatically);


• Support for the implementation of standard operational procedures within laboratories. That will be an advantage for a unitary work method of all the laboratories in the country (today the work method differs from a laboratory to another, which causes inconsistency of all recorded data);


• This improvement was also reflected on the accuracy of data transferred across all laboratories and of all issued documents, through the automatic validation of entered data, directly in the LIMS system (test reports, briefings, etc.);


• The integration of laboratory activity with other information systems (SNIIA, SIIE) is possible only by implementing and using the LIMS system.


• Real time access to statistical information referring to the activity of all laboratories in the country;


• Comparative statistics between all the counties in the country, obtained in real time;


• Real time availability of alert notifications at national level;

Project implementation

In 2009, A.N.S.V.S.A. decided the implementation of the ATLASvetLIMS information system in 18 laboratories and two relevant national institutes. Following the implementation, the client was immediately convinced that LIMS application can cover all work processes within the sanitary veterinary and food safety laboratories, from recordings of test requests, sample reception and undersampling, laboratory activity assignment, to the issuance of test reports and the generation of specific briefings. Considering that the initial project has been a success in 2012, A.N.S.V.S.A. decided to extend the system in all 44 laboratories at national level. After development, all initial objectives have been reached, and ATLASvetLIMS system was implemented at national level, becoming the main data provider in the veterinary medicine practice based on information, helping also at grounding decisions and development policies at the local and central level.

Regarding the labour force involvement, the successful implementation of this integrated system is not limited to the software acquisition, as it requires a continuous development, the active involvement and professional training of the entire personnel from the sanitary veterinary and food safety system. During the implementation we gave a particular attention to the employees that were the key factor in the system approval process, such as all that time more than 2,000 persons were trained at national level.

How does the system look today?