In late November, Tom and I (Matt) took a trip out to South East Asia to visit two key pilot labs in Laos and Cambodia, as a prelude to full local implementation. First stop was Mahosot hospital in Vientiane, where Dr Liz Ashley runs the Lao-Oxford-Mahosot Hospital-Wellcome Trust Research Unit (LOMWRU), which is embedded in the hospital's microbiology laboratory on the top floor.
Mahosot hospital, Vientiane at night!
It was wonderful to see this substantial facility in person for the first time, but after the tour, we were put to work very quickly to get SEDRI-LIMS producing specimen labels that were compatible with their Zebra label printer. While our label customisation facility allowed us to match the size and content of the labels being produced by their incumbent system (the MSFT Access based spin-off of the ACORN LIMS used in Cambodia), subsequent scanning of the barcodes was initially unreliable. This was solved by a change to the barcode resolution.
SEDRI-LIMS at multiple benches in the microbiology lab
We spent the rest of the week witnessing their laboratory workflows first hand and discussing useful enhancements with Risara Jaksuwan and Tamalee Roberts who we'd been working with remotely throughout the pilot and met at the ACORN conference the previous year. We also had a useful chat with Matthew Robinson and team about their molecular capability and how we might subsume this function into SEDRI-LIMS. While the whole team were very keen to go live with SEDRI-LIMS at the end of the trip, a curve ball was the need to import seven years of archived data from their existing LIMS, something SEDRI-LIMS is not currently able to handle. However, work has now begun back at the ranch on generic SEDRI-LIMS infrastructure to import and convert data from other systems by configuring a set of mappings for each field.
Matt & Tom (Arcta) with Dr Liz Ashley, Risara, Tamalee and team at LOMWRU
Next, we travelled on to Siem Reap to spend another week at the Angkor Hospital for Children (AHC), where we were hosted by Professor Paul Turner, who has been running the research lab there since 2012. As an aside, Paul is the "spiritual father" of the SEDRI-LIMS program, having spent decades in the fight against AMR. After building his own Access based microbiology LIMS (ACORN LIMS), he first brought it to the attention of SEDRIC that a professionally developed, fully open-source LIMS was required to replace it. He has been with us since the start of the project and has helped as much as anyone to shape the development of SEDRI-LIMS. In a sense then, we had come full circle! We also met Clare Ling (whom we had worked with remotely) and the rest of the small team there.
The COMRU microbiology lab in AHC, Siem Reap
After an inspiring tour of the hospital and the microbiology lab, we got to work introducing the team to the latest features and testing the local installation. While we were not able to get the system live during our visit (a stretch goal), we learnt and accomplished a great deal with the help of Clare and team.
Matt giving SEDRI-LIMS training to the local microbiology team
Next stop, the ASLM conference in Cape Town!!
Article first published: 09/12/23