June 2024: Fleming Facilitation

On May 1st, after much anticipation, we had our first informal chat with the Fleming Fund, as convened by Heidi Hopkins, the Technical Director (thanks Heidi!).  This had been a long time coming as Ben Amos, our consulting microbiologist in the UK, who has been with us from the start, back in 2020, is also a Fleming Fund member and has been looking to bring us together for a while now, once the timing was right.  The initial chat went very well, despite me (Matt) having to join from a noisy coffee shop full of screaming babies!  Questions about SEDRI-LIMS were nonetheless fielded by me, Janet and Ben to the point where enthusiastic interest was established and prospective sites were being mentioned.  A decision was taken to have two extended follow-up presentation/demo sessions with two sets of Fleming Fund grantees and interested parties to accommodate different time zones, one on June 5th, the other on the 12th.
 
One very important revelation for us on the call was that the term "pilot", hitherto liberally mentioned on our website and in connection with the current phase of the program, was giving completely the wrong impression about the maturity of the system.  I clarified that the product was approaching its fourth year of continuous development, had already been piloted for over 2 years at numerous sites across South America, Africa and South East Asia and was now live at 3 sites (one for almost a year) and pre-live at 5 more.  In other words, it is fully ready for mass deployment.  Shortly afterwards, we removed the offending term from the website!  Obviously all prospective sites need to evaluate the system for a period of time, just as they would any system, however established or mature, and there will always be tweaks and enhancements required throughout the SEDRI-LIMS lifecycle, as with any successful product, but noone should be under the impression that it is still in its beta phase!
 
The follow-up presentations went extremely well, with high levels of attendance at both.  The upshot is that we have now been connected with numerous prospective sites and proxies, namely: three new sites in Sierra Leone (Connaught Teaching Hospital laboratory, Ola During Children’s Hospital/Princess Christian Maternity Hospital Laboratory and Makeni Regional Hospital Laboratory), Menzies (Australia) on behalf of labs in Timor-Leste, the Centre for Infectious Disease Research in Zambia (CIDRZ) and Development Alternatives Incorporated (DAI) Pakistan.  We have already provisioned dedicated cloud-hosted instances of the system for evaluation by CIDRZ and DAI Pakistan and are working with the 3 labs in Sierra Leone to determine whether cloud evaluation is viable or local installations will be needed.  This is an excellent start and there are several more interested parties on the list that we have yet to follow-up with.  A fruitful engagement indeed!
 
Article first published: 18/06/24

 

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