Last month, SEDRI-LIMS went live at the Masanga lab in the Northern Province of Sierra Leone! This is a very significant milestone for two reasons: firstly because it represents our first live site anywhere and is hence the culmination of 3 years of development and groundwork; secondly because Masanga is exactly the type of lab SEDRI-LIMS was commissioned to support, a lab with no existing LIMS and zero IT infrastructure or expertise...a lab, in other words, that would not otherwise be providing any AMR surveillance data.
We were first contacted about Masanga by Ioana-Diana-Olaru, a microbiologist in Germany who was helping to build out the lab there. Ioana piloted a cloud-hosted version of the system for many months, providing invaluable feedback and driving significant improvements to the system before deciding that it was ready for deployment in situ.
When the time came, we pondered the most cost-effective and efficient way to deploy the system at Masanga, given the lack of equipment and poor internet stability. We eventually decided to source a laptop locally, preinstall it with SEDRI-LIMS and have Ioana take it out to Sierra Leone on her next visit, where she would train the local staff in its use.
As this was a standalone deployment with no supporting infrastructure, we were also required to provide a solution to data security and back-up. To this end, we enabled BitLocker encryption to secure the hard-drive in case of theft and developed additional utilities to perform automatic internal back-ups of the database on a schedule of the client's choosing and to write out the latest back-up (encrypted) to an authorised external USB drive (also provided) whenever inserted.
Although Ioana was already very proficient with the system, she spent a couple of days at our UK office receiving further training in the latest features and back-up mechanism before taking the laptop out to Masanga.
The upshot was that the deployment went extremely smoothly and Masanga started using live data very soon after receiving the laptop. Since then, there has been heavy and consistent use of the system with no problems reported. This is due in no small part to the efforts of Ioana throughout the engagement and to Marx and Islam at Masanga, who have been brilliant! Ioana continues to be a helpful SEDRI-LIMS advocate and has already opened doors for us in other territories such as Zimbabwe. Thanks Ioana!
Article first published: 04/08/23