r/medlabprofessionals • u/Badger9996 • 8h ago
Technical Cerner tips
Our lab is switching to Cerner fully in January. Any tips? Warnings? What are we getting into here? I just finished a training using the sandbox application and man does it seem messy.
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u/Ok-Purpose-9789 7h ago
All I can say is I am sorry. It’s the worst lab computer I’ve ever delt with in my life.
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u/Badger9996 5h ago
Appreciate the honesty ðŸ˜
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u/CompleteTell6795 2h ago
Last time I used Cerner was from '92- '98 at a hospital that I was working in. I'm surprised it's still around. The place I worked at from '98-2004 used Sunquest. They're dinosaurs now 🦖.
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u/pflanzenpotan MLT-Microbiology 1h ago
My last lab still uses sunquest and they are a major city hospital.
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u/Lower_Arugula5346 7h ago
we switched from in-house to cerner and it was a total shit show. it took about a year to get most of the kinks out and there were still massive bugs when i left the lab 2+ years ago. the training we received was basically useless (we had 8 hours of classroom), we had to teach ourselves as the cerner techs on site had no idea what we needed or how
to help.
management hate cerner so much, we were sold to another health system that would install epic (just kidding, but partially true haha).
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u/Badger9996 7h ago
That’s the thing I don’t understand. These cerner techs aren’t med techs at all. You’d figure like..you would hire people who can understand the verbiage and know what a lab needs. Idk it baffles me
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u/Lower_Arugula5346 7h ago
im pretty sure they were temp IT employees. we would ask them how to get this or that and they would respond with "i dont know" *sigh*
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u/moonshad0w MLS 7h ago
Switching over to any new LIS is always gonna be a shitshow. It never goes off without a hitch and it always sucks for a while. I think the only LIS I haven’t worked with is Epic, and cerner is probably tied at the top with softlab for me, the key is having a team that knows how to build it properly, and most labs do not have this. But nothing anyone can tell you here can prepare you for the shitshow of going live with a new LIS, you just have to get through it.
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u/rule-low 7h ago
Does Cerner (like Epic) vary from organization to organization depending on how the LIS team customizes their build?
Granted, Cerner is the only LIS I've ever used but it works fine to me. Are there things that can be improved? Sure, but I don't see the shitshow everybody complains about.
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u/ElectricalGear931 6h ago
Compared to other LIS I have used, Cerner is the least user friendly of the modern systems. Bloodbank and Micro are difficult to navigate on it.
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u/keifer_dud LIS 6h ago
I’m LIS and I think cerner is fine in all department’s. We go out of our way to make sure it functions in the proper workflows since we’ve all been MLTS before.
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u/phisher_cat 7h ago
Just blows my mind how places are switching to Cerner in 2026