By the time the first cases of Coronavirus were recorded in Ghana, the country wasn’t exactly sure of what it was about to be hit with. And by the time the cases multiplied, months later, the health infrastructure in this country surely felt the heavy pinch.

With hospitals forced to readjust their definitions of emergency cases across the country, reducing the priorities given to some medical conditions hitherto considered so, the testing of suspected cases of coronavirus also begun to overwhelm the facilities that undertook the tests.

One of such institutes was the Noguchi Memorial Institute of Medical Research, which was responsible for a chunk of the testing that was done in the country.

It was a looming crisis that could have spiralled even more now, seeing that the case counts in the country have multiplied recently and health facilities are having to turn away new patients for lack of space to accommodate them.

But, Dr. Rosemary Keatley, the Medical Director of Medlab Services Ghana Ltd, knew she could just not sit down and do nothing.

“At the start of the pandemic, as our numbers grew, we realized that testing was getting overwhelmed and there were delays in reporting results. When that happens, tracking and tracing is extended and so you can’t really control the pandemic very well,” she said.

This desire pushed her to leverage her knowledge and influence within the sector, pulling resources from the private sector to get the Virology Laboratories of the Noguchi Memorial Institute of Medical Research, a Laboratory Information System.

The SchuyLab LIS was successfully installed and will expand coronavirus testing capacity by over 30% as well as increase the speed of delivering test results.

A Laboratory Information System is an automated, integrated system for registering laboratory specimens, tracking and reporting test samples, releasing results, and archiving data.

The installation at Noguchi is the first phase of the “LIS for Ghana” project, and is planned to be followed this year by a similar installation at the National Public Health Reference Laboratory, Accra (NPHRL).

Speaking exclusively to GhanaWeb on the sidelines of the official installation of the LIS at the University of Ghana, Dr. Keatley said that the system comes at a great time to support the country’s efforts in the fight against the pandemic.

“Noguchi was doing the main part of the testing and we thought that as professionals in the medical field, the best way to support the government was by giving them a digital system rather than the manual system of logging in patients testing and producing results.

“And so, since there was very little budget, we decided the funds, procure a Laboratory Information System which actually talks to the analyzers – the machines, and produces results digitally. And that would shorten the time of the long process, deliver the result in a confidential way, archive the result, and allow you access it when you need it,” she said.

She expressed great joy that the LIS has been fully installed because it would help identify hotspots for the spread of the virus and proactively work at reducing the spread, through the timely data it will produce.

According to Prof. Abraham Anang, Director of Noguchi, “We are grateful to Dr. Rosemary Keatley and the project team for the installation of the state-of-the-art system. We also thank donors from all over the world for their generous support. We are ramping up the rate of COVID-19 testing, and the SchuyLab system will automate the logging of samples, verification of test results, and archiving of data, which previously had to be done manually.”

Private donors who donated over 80% of the cost of the project include the Ghana COVID-19 Private Sector Fund, Fidelity Bank Ghana Ltd, Sir Sam Jonah, the Leibinger family of Germany, Medlab Services Ghana Ltd, SchuylerHouse Inc., and some anonymous donors in Switzerland.