LIS Implementation project for the Ministry of Health of Liberia

The University of Massachusetts Medical School (UMMS), under the supervision of the Centers for Diseases Control and Prevention (CDC), hires Naralabs (Feb 2017) for the implementation and deployment of a Laboratory Information System (LIS) based on the Open Source platform Bika Health (AGPL license), at the request of the Ministry of Health of Liberia.

The project is part of the Ebola outbreak prevention program extension in Liberia, with a total funding of $20M, led by the Academic Consortium Combating Ebola in Liberia (ACCEL), a group of infection control specialists Formed by UMMS.

This project aims to formalize, improve and automate the human sample reception processes and their corresponding laboratory analyses for a rapid detection of Ebola and Lassa fever viruses, among others. In both cases, viral agents that occur as haemorrhagic fevers, with extremely high mortality rates and a very high risk of infection. Liberia was the country with the greatest impact of the Ebola virus epidemic in Western Africa between 2013 and 2016, with more than 10,500 positive cases and more than 4,600 deaths in the country. The great impact of this epidemic evidenced the need to implement protocols and tools for the early detection of possible outbreaks of infection, their control and monitoring. The short-term objective of the project is the implementation of an agile and reliable system that guarantees the correct processing of samples and analytics in the specialized centers of the country, with the registration of additional data about patients, their communities and relevant information for monitoring and impact studies. The medium- and long-term objective is to have enough information for the effective deployment of preventive measures among the population and to ensure a rapid and coordinated response to new outbreaks in order to reduce the risk of an epidemic.

Apart from the implementation and deployment of the LIS, technology transfer is another central element of the project: thus, two native people are also members of the implementation team led by Naralabs and are trained in the technical field. In this way, it is intended to guarantee the continuity of the project, so that technical staff from the country itself can be responsible, in the medium / long term, of the technical maintenance of the system and possible corrective actions and customizations.