This is an comprehensive look at CLIP in Freezerworks Basic 7. Learn when and how to use this efficient batch entry tool.
Hello and welcome to our class on using Batch Entry in Freezerworks Basic. Batch Entry is an option in Freezerworks Basic. We also like to call it CLIP, Batch Enter CLIP. It stands for Clinical Lab Inventory Program (CLIP). What CLIP is good for is if you are a busy lab that’s storing for short-term purposes only, hundreds to thousands of samples, for perhaps a week or two, in a hospital or a clinic that’s running a lot of tests and maybe within that week or two you may want to pull out an aliquot and run an additional test, you need CLIP to find that vial quickly and run that additional test. CLIP = Clinical Laboratory Inventory Program.
A lot of our clients that use CLIP will create their freezers (they’ll be freezers that may even be a walk-in refrigerator or refrigerators with racks) and the racks are separated by days of the week. So on Monday, they run their tests and they store these samples that the tests were run on. Tuesday, they run the Tuesday samples and store them there, and so forth. Then, by the end of the week and they start a new week, Monday comes along again, and if Monday is when they discard last week’s samples (if they’re only storing them for seven days), they would then remove and discard the Monday samples and create a new batch of samples for storage. This is what CLIP is very, very useful for. A large number of clients of ours use CLIP for this purpose.
I’m going to show you here how to set up and utilize CLIP to save hours of time on a daily basis finding those samples that need to be located in order to run, for example, an add-on test as well as you know to be added on to the original test that the sample is used for. CLIP can be used for long-term storage as well. If you’ve got a lot of aliquots and you need to store them quickly, you want to put them in the freezer location and you don’t need to store a lot of data just the location of the sample or aliquot, CLIP is very useful for that as well. So, the first thing I’m going to do in this example is set up a freezer or refrigerator much like a number of our clients have. This will be a walk-in refrigerator (a walk-in room where you come in and they’ll have different shelves), the shelves will be listed according to the day of the week, then each shelf will have 12×6 racks which are very common in the clinical lab (they’ll be numbered), and then you’ll find the rack and pull the aliquot out that you need to run the test on.
Let’s first create a freezer for this kind of a situation. We go to System Admin and down to Freezers. Let’s go to Configure Freezers. We’re going to add a new freezer. We’ll call it the Walk In. Now in the Walk In we’ll have seven sections, a section for each day of the week. Let’s go ahead and set that up here. So we have the freezer name, let’s now add a new section here. Okay, in the freezer section name the first one will be called Monday. Now Monday will have a shelf, maybe one, maybe two shelves, depending on the size. For the Monday samples, we’ll just say that each day the week has one shelf, so Monday has one shelf and then each shelf will have the racks. We have some default words here; we can go ahead and use rack, so each shelf will have a number of racks. Let’s say that every day we store up to 25 racks (12×6 racks) and we number them 1 by 25 and if we need more we can always add more later. If we don’t need them all it’s no problem, we don’t have to use them all. So Monday has one shelf, 25 racks, each rack has rows and columns, so let’s go ahead and start with row. Now if I use a subdivision name that isn’t here, I can just type it right in, or I can select anyone that’s here already. Let’s go ahead and go row, and we will have Alpha Rows, we’ll have six Alpha rows, starting with “A” and then column will be the next one. Again, I can you either type it in or if it’s there I can go ahead and use it, and there it is. And we have 12 columns in each of our racks. It’s set up like this. Now, our aliquot positions are defined by row and column so we select the default here, row and column, which is fine and that tells us the exact location of the tube that we want to locate. Down here in Properties, we default aliquots to be called Vials. Let’s go ahead and call it a tube. Every tube is going to be assigned a unique position because when we go and find the rack for that tube, we will go exactly right to the location of that tube. If we look at our Configuration picture here, we can see that we have our 12 by 6 rack, and we have our 6 rows and each row has 12 columns. We can go to View Configuration, look at our shelf and we see here that we do indeed have 25 racks, each rack has 6 rows, each row has 12 columns (very standard setup), and if there’s any kinds of setup that needs to be changed, fixed, or made different we go to Define Exceptions. We don’t need to do that here though.
Now we’ve made our first shelf in a walk-in refrigerator called Monday. What we want to do is create the rest. We want to save this as a template so that we can use this over and over again, and we’ll quickly create our walk in refrigerator this way. So let’s save as template, and we’ll go to Save. Let’s now add our second section in our Walk In refrigerator. We’ll use the template Monday, which was the one we just created (we made a template out of it), and here it is. We have a copy of Monday, we will call it Tuesday and our Tuesday shelf will be set up the same way. Hit Save. Add a new one, and again use the template Monday and create our next shelf in our Walk In, called Wednesday. Save it, and we continue with this until we’ve got our Walk In freezer set up. There’s Thursday, I’ll save that. Now we need Friday, Saturday, and Sunday, and just like that our Walk In refrigerator is now created and ready to be used, and there it is.
The next thing we want to do is make sure that we have Sample Types. We go to System Admin – Sample Types, and I’ve got a couple here created already. I’m storing Plasma and I’m storing Serum and these are my sample types. So Plasma, I’ve created 2 ml as our default amount. We don’t need to put Default # Aliquots. When we use CLIP, every time we scan a vial it saves one sample record with one aliquot. a 1:1 relationship. So there’s no Default # Aliquot, its default is going to be one so we’ll just leave that blank. I’ve got a Serum set up the same way. So, create your sample types and the next thing I want to do is go to the System Properties because here we have some fields here that we want to set up for CLIP configuration.
Now in CLIP, we want to create a User Defined Field that will hold the Storage Date (the date that we store the sample), and then we also want to create a User Defined Field where we tell it the Discard Date. We also want to know which field is scanned (right now we don’t have any User Defined Fields here), and the number of days to hold samples. So we’re going to need a Sample ID scan number, we’re going to need a Storage Date, and Discard Date. Let’s go ahead and create those next, and then we can fill this out.
So break out of here, let’s go back to System Admin and User Defined Fields. Here we are at Add New. We are going to add some User Defined Fields. First one will be Storage Date, we need a storage date. This is a Field Type of Date, so date fields. The length will be hard-coded for the date and this is fine here. We don’t need to do anything else here. We can make it a required field, but CLIP will be a required field as well. We can give it a Tool Tip as well. Let’s leave this blank, for now, we just want a Storage Date and save that. Now we want a Discard Date, and the same thing here, we give it a Date Field Type so that it needs to be a legitimate date that can be scanned and entered here, and we will save that as well. Then the third field we need is the tube identifier, we can call it Tube ID, Sample ID, or something like that. We’ll go ahead and give it a 12 character length. This is a number that’s on the tube that we scan and give it a location. So, let’s go ahead and save these fields. Here are our User Defined Fields: Discard Date, Storage Date, and Tube ID. We can have others as well, this will be fine for our purposes.
So, with those created the next thing we need to do is go to Configure Layouts – Samples Entry. Let’s go ahead and put these on an entry screen. Here’s our Default Input, which is our format name, that will be work fine for us. Let’s leave Default Input. Configure it, and now we need to put our fields on our entry screen. This is the entry screen or the viewing screen for looking at a sample and an aliquot. Sample information is up here aliquot information down here. Again, it will be a 1:1 relationship when you use CLIP, so let’s go ahead and add the fields. We go to Samples – Add Fields, and let’s go ahead and click and drag the fields onto the screen. We have our Sample Type, then we have our Tube ID, we have our Discard Date, and we have our Storage Date. We could have free text as well. We could say something like CLIP viewing screen; we can do that as well. Let’s go ahead and call it CLIP Viewing Screen. Okay, we’ll make it bold and put it over here.
Okay, I think that we can do a better job of setting up our system. Let’s put the Sample Type here, let’s put the Tube ID here, that’s fine we’ll leave those like this. Let’s line these up here, we’ll select these four and then we’ll use our Alignment Tools so they’re nice and straight like this. In the aliquots section, I need to include the freezer locations. So let’s go to Aliquot – Modify Page, and I’m going to select Freezer Position and append that over here. So displayed fields here will be the freezer position, that’s really all we need. Let’s save that and here they are. I’m going to drag these out a little bit so we can read the locations, and we won’t need all five. So, if I scan in a sample I will have the scanned ID number, I’ll have the Sample Type, the day we stored it, the day we’re going to throw it away, and down here will tell me what freezer it’s in (which we be Walk In), which section (Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday), and then the position in the rack. So, looks good, let’s save that here, and now if we go to Add New Samples we can take a look at our entry screen right here. We’re not going to enter samples here in this screen; we’re just going to view them because CLIP has its own entry screen. We have created our freezer, we have some sample types, we created our User Defined Fields, and we’ve created our Samples Entry Screen.
Let’s go back now to System Admin – CLIP and finish the CLIP configuration. We want to know which User Defined Field holds the storage date, that would be what we called Storage Date, discard date would be Discard Date, the field used for scanning (that’s our Tube ID), and the default number of days to hold samples. This would be the day CLIP will want to know what would a Discard Date be, if it’s a week afterwards then I’ll put a seven here, it’s two weeks after the storage date, 14, it’s 10 days, 10, and so forth. I’m going to put seven here and we’ll show you how this works when we do it that way. CLIP configuration is now set up, oh the other thing we’re going to want to do is use Quick Search. That’s going to be our Tube ID, and I’ll show you what the Quick Search is. That will give us a little window here that we can have open at all times to scan the ID number and locate the sample we want. So, CLIP configuration and quick search.
These are now set up. Let’s go ahead now and scan a bunch of tubes into our freezer. To do that, Sample Management – Batch Enter CLIP, and here’s our Batch Enter CLIP screen right here. We can, at one sitting, enter up to 100 sample aliquot tubes into the system. What we want to do first is select the freezer, that will be our Walk In freezer. Select a section, let’s go ahead and select Thursday, Storage Date – 5/30/2013 is the default date (the Storage Date defaulted to today’s date), I can change that if I’m working on a different day (if I’m back entering, for example, I can change that here), but I think I’ll leave it here at 5/30/2013. And then the Discard Date, as we set up in the CLIP configuration, is seven days after the storage date, so it’s defaulted to seven days after the 30th (the sixth of June). Now a Sample type, if I want to include a Sample Type, I can do that here. We created a couple of these earlier – Plasma, Serum. Let’s say that these are Serum samples and the default amount that I set up in my sample types is 2.
So, I’m all ready to start scanning, and down here is where I scan. As you can see, I’ve got a rack here, Rack & Shelf 1. Freezer Thursday each has one shelf. I’m going to start here at Rack 1. If I want to start at Rack 2, Rack 3, or in the middle of a rack, I can Change what we call the next position or NAP here. I could change it to Rack 2 or Rack 3, but I’m starting this at my first rack on Thursday. It’s Thursday morning and I’m ready to store samples so all I’ve got to do is put my cursor in the Tube ID and begin to scan my aliquots. So, I’ve got a rack of tubes here, I’m now going to pull them out and scan the ID number into where they go. You can’t see it here, but in my hand, I’ve got a scanner, and you’ll be able to hear me scan these samples. This ID number is going to go in A 1 and then I put in A 1. This one will go on A 2 and I put it in A 2, A 3 and so forth. So, (I’ll just start skipping around here because your numbers will all be in different areas of course) as you can see, I just go ahead and pull each vial out, scan it, and put it in the place I want it to be in the freezer. Let’s say that after 10, or before 10, I wanted to put 100006, I’ll go ahead and put that here. So I would go ahead and insert it there. So, if I do make mistake you can go back and insert something that didn’t get scanned. I can do that, that way. So here are my numbers I would scan after I fill it in here. To show you how this works, it goes to the next page. I scan and when it gets here, it goes to the next page. I scan it, it goes next page. So I’ve filled my rack, I’m going to go store it, I’m going to put it in in the Thursday freezer now. So, I hit save. When I do that they get saved, and I can select OK. And there they are. So, I filled out a rack.
If I want to go look at that rack now, I can go to View Inventory – Explore Freezers. There’s my Walk In freezer. Now, there’s nothing in Monday, nothing in Tuesday, Thursday I have one shelf. I have one rack, and here is my rack. Now, what I’m going to want to do is display the Tube ID here. The Unique Aliquot ID is a number that Freezerworks gives it, that doesn’t mean anything us here. We want the unique Tube ID here. If I double-click on any of these I can go into the viewing screen and see the sample that I just double-clicked and went into. Here’s the viewing screen here, it tells me where in the freezer I need it. So, this is how I can view an entire freezer, by scrolling up and down this Walk In, I can do that. What’s normally going to happen though is you’re going to store these, you’re going to put them away, and then the day is going to come or time comes the doctor says “Hey pull out a certain sample I need to run a test on that, we’re going to run a second test.” How would I do that?
The easiest way is in View Inventory. I’m going to Launch Quick Search, here it is, Launch Quick Search. With Quick Search launched, this little window will stay out here all the time, but the cursor is sitting here. So I go ahead, I do my work in the lab, I get a call from the doctor to pull a sample out and test it, so I find the Tube ID that the Lab Information System (LIMS) or Hospital Information System gave this aliquot. I pull it out and here it is, and now I just go ahead scan and locate it, and we’ll just do this here like this. So, I scan it, as you can see the number gets scanned and the aliquot shows up right here. I got one aliquot here. This is the Freezerworks ID, we’ll want to change this to Tube ID here, but it’s the same aliquot. We’ll double-click on it and we can see that 100005 is the tube that I want, and this is the Freezerworks ID that we’re not really using in this situation. So I’ve scanned, I’ve located it, now I go to the Thursday freezer. I go to Rack 1, I pull out Rack 1, I go to A 7, and there it is. I pull it out and I can do my work. I may want to go ahead and delete that aliquot here when I’m done. So, I pulled it out, delete it (Delete Entire Aliquot), when it’s tested it’s gone. I removed it and so Aliquot Number 1 is now gone because I deleted it, and I run my test. I found it very quickly, used it, and everything.
The nice thing also about Freezerworks is that as I do these things the Audit Trail keeps track of everything that I’ve done. I can see when the sample was added, I can see this Discard Date and all those kinds of things. I can see the aliquot when it was removed, when it was deleted, when it was created, and so forth. These fields cannon be tampered with, but they’re very useful to prove what you did with the aliquots and samples. You have a backup trail. Who did it, what process I used, and what they did with each sample and aliquot record. It is very useful. So this is what I do then. With CLIP I quickly enter, I quickly locate, and I keep things straight that way.
Let’s say that the week has gone by and it’s Thursday again. The First thing I’m going to want to do when I come in the morning is delete Thursday samples. I’m going to remove them from the refrigerator, it’s been a week, and so what I want to do is I’ll go to Simple Search here. I’m going to Simple Search for samples. I want the samples that have a Discard Date of a week later, and so this will come up as June 6th. Hit okay, and here are 14 samples that are ready to be deleted. What I want to do now is go ahead and select them and delete them. This is a view screen. I think what I want to do, we didn’t do this earlier, let me do this now, is make this a little more useful. It’s a list view, it’s called Samples List View and I’m going to add some more fields to that to make this a little more useful. So, I don’t really care about the Freezerworks ID, I want the tube ID. We move Tube ID, I want the Storage Date, I want the Discard Date, and I think that’s probably going to be fine for me. Maybe a Sample Type as well, why not! So, this is the list view. Now, when I save this and I go back. I scan this as you can see now and I’ve got a little more information. I can scan, okay, this is a tube I want. Double-click and go in like this. So again, it’s a week later. Now, let’s go ahead and delete our aliquots. It’s Thursday, and the first thing I want to do is delete last Thursday’s samples. I’ll go to simple search and samples Discard Date is equal to June 6th, hit OK and now I can see that, yes, these are all my tubes for today, the sixth. If I want to double check it, I go in here and say, yeah, these are all Thursday’s samples. I’m going to go ahead and delete them, like so. Before I do that, let me show you another way to delete.
This would come in handy because it would be easier if you went to View Inventory – Explore Freezers and went to Walk In, went Thursday, and selected the racks and just delete it in this way. So, here’s our rack and I could delete the whole rack, and I can hit Delete. This will delete the entire rack of all these samples. I can do that as well, and this would be a nice easy way, so now Thursday is now empty. Now, whenever a section is empty you’ll see that when I click on the “X” box it disappears so Thursday is now empty it has no aliquots. However, the way Freezerworks is set up, you have a sample and you have aliquots listed to that sample. This Explore Freezers only deletes the aliquots, but the sample records are still in the system, so it still works but it’s not as clean. So, what I also want to do after that is I want to go and do my Simple Search in the same fashion, and go and find my June 6th samples again. As you can see, even though I deleted those 14 aliquots, the sample records still remain. I have not deleted the sample records because that those get deleted here, so if you can see if, I go in here I still have my sample record but my aliquots are now deleted because I deleted them at that last screen. As I scroll to the next I can see that that the aliquots are all gone. So, that’s a big thing you want to know about Freezerworks, aliquots are linked to samples, if I delete the aliquots in Explore Freezers like I did before, I can do that, but the samples are still there, so over time, you may find you’ll have all these empty sample records. A nice easy way to do that would be to go ahead and do your Discard Date Search, list them all, select them all, and then press Delete and you can delete all your aliquots of your sample records that way. So, now my system is totally clean, I’ve got no samples here. I’ve deleted them all. If I’m going to go ahead and do the search, like so, I will find no matching samples.
The CLIP also has an automated way to regularly delete the samples that need to be deleted, to help the administrator who needs to do this task to do it quickly and easily. Let me show you how this is set up and used. You set this up at System Admin – System Properties, and over here we have something called Automatic Export. This gives you the ability to have a user, for example here, an administrator. When he logs in, on a daily basis or every other day, in this situation you’d want every day to log in and Freezerworks will tell him and that he can now delete a sample that needs to be deleted. You enable this, select the user that would be doing the operation, and then set the Export Frequency. So, every day this Automatic Export will pop up for the user, Admin, when you log in. If there’s a three here, then every third day he’ll be asked if he wants to an Automatic Export. One thing to know about Automatic Export is that it will select samples that we’ll be ready for deletion by looking at the Discard Date and coming after the Discard Date. If your Discard Date is the same day that you’re running Automatic Export, those samples will not be discarded. It’s all samples that have not been deleted after the Discard Date. So, it looks at the Discard Date, it selects all those samples with aliquots that come after that Discard Date.
The other thing the Automatic Export does is keep your data file clean from deleted records. When you delete a record, a sample or aliquot, or sample with aliquots, in Freezerworks the record is marked as deleted, but it hasn’t been actually deleted from the database. In older versions of Freezerworks and CLIP, over time these deleted records that weren’t totally removed would start to build up and the program would suffer from performance. So, what we did was created a way to delete deleted records. Also, the Audit Trail will leave the record, which is cleaned up as well. So Automatic Export will delete the records, delete the audit trail from the deleted records, but before doing so give you a text file that you can save. So, let me show you how this will work then. Let’s go ahead and save this. What I’ve done is I went ahead and entered some more samples into our database; here I’ve got 14 sample records with a Discard Date of the 17th of June. So, if this is the 17th of June and I want to delete all of them and clean it up (clear them out and delete them), I would select them all (highlight them all), and hit Delete. Let’s go ahead and just delete a couple of them here. Let’s just delete these last two ones here. I’m going to select and hit Delete, and I get a print message. I’m not going to verify the print, I’m just going to delete them, so I select Yes here. Now we have 12 samples, those two have been deleted. They have not, however, been totally removed from the database. If I come down to List of Deleted Samples, I’ll see them here. So, if I want to go back and look at deleted samples in a view only aspect, I can do that look. I can look at the Audit trail and that kind of thing. If performance starts to lag and I need to delete and clean out my deleted records, then that’s what I would use. Automatic Export can help me to do that on a regular basis. So, let’s go ahead and do that.
What I’m going to do is exit out and log in back into Freezerworks as admin. I’m going to go ahead and quit, I’m going to log back in now as admin, and we’ll see the Automatic Export option show up. Now, when I select OK, the program will see that I’m admin and it’ll look to see if it’s time to run Automatic Deletion. And it is, I haven’t run it today, I asked to do it every day. I’m going to select Yes here, and here are the results of the search. Freezerworks has found 14 sample records that have an expiration date greater than today’s date, which is the 18th of June. Now, we deleted two of those, it’s selecting those as well, so there are actually 14 that are going to be discarded. 12 that have not that marked as deleted 2 that have been marked as deleted. Now, the reason why we save deleted samples in the Audit Trail is so that you have a long-term backup of everything you did. You can go back and see the samples I came in and deleted, that kind of thing. It’s good for quality assurance, but for performance reasons, if you decide you want to delete those deleted records but have a backup of the information, we give you the ability to do this by creating export files. Let’s go ahead and discard samples on or after this date and let’s go and select today’s date here. It would be samples discarded on or after June 18th. Actually, let’s go ahead and just select the day before just to make sure we have everything. Select Save, and the first thing it’ll do is it’ll create a file of the exported audit trail information. Select OK and let’s go ahead and find a place we want to save these things. I’ll make this 2013 text, and I also need a file name for deleted records file, so it’ll be two files that we’re saving. I’ll give this one a “d” for deleted records. So, I’ve saved a text file of all of the information.
So, now when I go to my View Inventory, remember I have those records for the Discard Date of yesterday, the 17th, we see that it’s clear and they’re gone. If we go and look at the Deleted Samples we see that those two deleted samples that had earlier are deleted as well. We’re keeping the data file small and manageable by removing extraneous information that we don’t need anymore. If I do need it, however, I can get it by selecting those data files. Let’s go and take a look at those now. Those text files that I created and they are right here. Let’s take a look at the first one, and this is all of the information for the samples that were deleted exported on this date from the Audit Trail (what was done, which user did it, and so forth). That’s the Audit Trail, let’s open up deleted records, here they are, the records that were deleted and the day that they were deleted.
This concludes our class on using the CLIP Batch Entry in Freezerworks Basic 7. This is again, Rick Michels, thank you for your time. If you have any questions please give us a call (877-289-7960) or email us at Support@Freezerworks.com. We are happy to help you through it here at Dataworks, thank you.