One example of the kind of work The BioChain Advisory does: helping organisations work out whether their systems can actually prove what they claim, before a regulator, investor, customer or incident forces the question. Here is how that played out.
A laboratory had decided to replace a long-standing Laboratory Information Management System with a newer platform. The technical migration plan was well developed: records were to be exported, transformed and imported into the new environment, users would be retrained, and the legacy system would eventually be retired.
What was less clear was whether the organisation would preserve the full evidential history behind its existing results.
Historical identifiers did not map cleanly into the new system. Audit-trail records used a different structure. Attachments, comments and amendments sat outside the primary database. Some records referred to users or workflows that would not exist in the new environment. The laboratory had been confident that the data would migrate successfully, without having tested whether an older result could still be reconstructed from source to conclusion once the migration was complete.
We ran a Data Integrity Audit examining representative evidence chains across both the legacy and proposed environments. The review traced selected results back through source records, sample identifiers, analytical steps, approvals, amendments and supporting documentation, to determine which elements of the evidence chain would survive the migration and which would become difficult or impossible to verify.
The engagement also examined how identifiers were translated between systems, whether audit history stayed associated with the correct records, what would happen to records that could not be migrated directly, and whether the archived legacy system would remain recoverable in a form that was still meaningful.
The purpose was not to redesign the LIMS implementation. It was to answer a more fundamental question:
After the old system is switched off, will the organisation still be able to prove how an important result was produced?
The findings helped the laboratory prioritise which historical records had to be preserved, where additional controls were required before migration, and what evidence needed to be retained to support future regulatory, customer or scientific scrutiny.
It depends on the number of record types and systems involved, but a focused review of a single migration typically runs alongside the technical migration project rather than delaying it.
Ideally before cutover, while the legacy system is still live and can be queried directly. Reviews run after the fact are still useful, but some evidence may already be harder to recover.
Yes. We are not migrating the system ourselves, so we work alongside whoever is — your internal team or the vendor running the technical migration — and focus specifically on what the evidence trail needs to survive it.
A findings report mapping which evidence chains survive the migration intact, which are at risk, and specific, prioritised actions to take before cutover — not a generic checklist, but a document built around your actual records.
The BioChain Advisory helps organisations understand how evidence actually moves through their existing systems, independent of whether they ever deploy The BioChain platform itself. Engagements typically take one of two forms: a Data Integrity Audit, tracing representative evidence chains from source to conclusion to establish what can genuinely be demonstrated, or a Regulatory & Cross-Border Readiness Review, examining whether an organisation's systems and records can support the claims a new jurisdiction or regulation requires.