Understanding the Benefits of Electronic Lab Notebooks: An Interview With Dr Klemen Zupancic

Electronic Lab Notebooks (ELNs) are programs designed to increase lab team efficiencies and reduce both error and risk in patient data. Despite its benefits to the pharma sector, the technology is still under-utilised by researchers and scientists who don’t understand its worth. We spoke to Dr Klemen Zupancic, CEO of SciNote, maker of the top-rated ELN for laboratories, about his work within the space and how ELNs can improve sites’ work markedly.

PharmaFeatures: Which were the fundamental unmet needs that spurred on the creation of SciNote’s ELN? 

Klemen Zupancic: In the beginning, we were approached by a number of companies who had large amounts of data stored, but were having trouble tracking this data, largely due to much of it being stored on paper. This spurred our research in 2015, when we joined forces with the University of Southampton and created a larger study on ELN regarding popular opinion, possible alternative solutions, and the challenges of implementing these systems. With this understanding, we created SciNote and launched it in 2016.

PF: What are the benefits of ELNs?

KZ: The first benefit is definitely organisation: Everything has a search bar, and ELNs force you to neatly organise everything so they are easier to find and share. This becomes even more valuable later when regulatory compliance is required.

Later, this becomes valuable if companies are doing anything that requires ensuring compliance, for example audit trails, digital signatures, etcetera. The same is also true for public research financers and funding bodies – e.g. the National Institutes of Health, European Commission: more and more these organisations require companies to have a digital plan for their data. 

Another benefit is safety and security. Paper notebooks do bring benefits, as the data is always to hand; but having data backed up, on a secure server, with a team of specialists ensuring its secure – that adds another dimension and more value to the data.

PF: Do you see ELNs replacing paper notebooks in the next five years? 

KZ: I don’t think ELNs will necessarily replace paper any time soon. We see a lot of companies using both in parallel. But in the past year in particular, many are moving away from paper and onto tablet computers. That is why our new plan offers free laboratory-grade tablet computers that can provide aid as the best alternative to the paper notebook. 

Additionally, many who are transitioning have extremely ambitious goals – they want to replace all their paper systems overnight. This idea comes with its own challenges, and in my experience what works best is first switching all new projects to ELN technology and keeping current and previous projects using their old, presumably paper, systems, until all projects can use ELNs as a single source of truth.

PF: How much time do ELNs save over paper note-taking?

KZ: After the initial implementation stage of setting up an ELN, companies quickly find themselves saving at least one day a week, per user. This is what people should expect from a digital system as a minimum saving, with return on investment being achieved very quickly. 

There certainly is an amount of energy required in setting up an ELN and onboarding the team, as effort must first be put into understanding the processes that will change. Despite that, the effort is still less than many people expect, especially if a good plan is already in place. We at SciNote have developed our own program on how to do this efficiently. 

The most dramatic changes in time-saving come mostly from reporting, as this is all recorded in a systematic way; on collaboration, e.g. having meetings on sharing data, explaining where siloed data lies to other teams; and on reduction of repetitive tasks, for example using templates when running one experiment over and over. 

PI: What additional data securities do ELNs bring to sites over alternative note systems?

KZ: The first answer to this question regards security from hackers or those wishing to steal the intellectual property of certain scientific experiments that could have enormous value. In this regard, we’re working with Cloud partners with knowledge of industry standards to implement a large number of our own security measures (which can also be found in our White Paper). 

In addition to our own measures, there are teams of Amazon security engineers looking out for new threats and monitoring infrastructure. This brings security to a totally different level, as opposed to files sitting on a hard drive on an employee’s PC. 

The second aspect is data safety relating to data back-ups, which are offered by Cloud providers. If anything is accidentally deleted or changed, ELNs provide traceability and a backup – any changes can ultimately be reverted. 

PF: How have you found cultural compliance with ELNs and this new technology? Does it come naturally or require time?

KZ: Cultural compliance definitely requires time. There are always differences between organisations, but typically whenever an organisation adopts an ELN or other digital system, some of those affected are excited by the change and some resent or dislike it. But for a change like this to be successful, all employees must be on board and it is often a challenge to ensure the team is fully in sync. There are some key points to remember when overcoming this:

– management must support a digital strategy, both empowering their workers and providing budget for specific solutions. This is vital: one individual at the bench cannot change much. Organisation buy-in is critical to ensuring change occurs

– It is important to take time to show resistant individuals how to adjust to the new systems, work to understand where their pain points are, and determine whether these processes can be adjusted to reduce these pain points. In other words: we should change the system so they can see value and time savings.

PF: How does SciNote beat its competitors in the space? 

KZ: There are a number of ELNs in the marketplace, and there is no one superior product on the market that someone could say is better for any organisation. Every product has its own benefits and weaknesses, and customers should definitely do their own research before committing to any of them. 

What sets SciNote apart is our program to customer success. We’re committed to bringing the fastest return on investment to our customers, and we work with them until they have the solution fully implemented. Our system of checks and balances can figure out if the customer is successfully using the software, and we have a team of experts, each of which has at some point worked at the bench, on hand to help. 

The other point to mention is that SciNote is interoperable. The product is Open Source, with open access to the API so that we can ensure SciNote lives within a company’s existing ecosystem of tools. 

PF: Is there anything else you’d like to add? 

KZ: If you’re a research laboratory and are currently using paper notebooks as the main tool of data keeping, ELNs can add a lot of value and save significant time. But again, it’s important to find the one that suits you best. 

Once this decision has been made, it is important not to overwhelm your team with plans that are too ambitious on implementing an ELN. It can be done over a period of time, and starting slowly to determine the best way to set up new processes is more likely to ensure success faster. 

For those wishing to learn further about SciNote’s ELN, or schedule a meeting with the company, click here. 

To learn more about SciNote, see their homepage. Dr Zupancic can be reached on his LinkedIn profile.

Joshua Neil, Editor
PharmaFeatures