Hospitals run their own version of LIMS called LIS (Laboratory Information Systems - go figure). The common practice is to partition off your lab network behind a firewall. The reason is because many of the instrumentation vendors still run their instrument control software on legacy OS versions and cannot be upgraded, as well as the fact that the operation of these systems can be critical to the organization and there is usually little to no redundancy due to cost. That being said, there is no reason that a modern LIMS/LIS system cannot be integrated with these legacy systems. In fact, that is usually what happens: An organization's central IT group puts just enough money in the budget to upgrade to the latest version of the LIMS, but doesn't include any costs for upgrading of instrumentation control software.
