Re: Readiness of BIKA-Health

[lemoene]

Hi Christoph

Greetings from St. Kitts,
It was during the current 6th CCAS Annual HIV/AIDS Workshop that takes place in conjunction with the Caribbean Regional HIV/AIDS Training Network that the question came up again about BIKA Health's readiness for deployment.

Damn, where were we....

As OpenELIS has its drawbacks, there is an immense interest in BIKA, and there is a number of clinical laboratories that wish to contribute.

Great news!

Could you kindly update me, as I may pass this on in my position as CCAS board and faculty member. Also, I would like to link in a number of laboratories in East and Central Africa.

Our progress, or lack thereof, can be tracked at our discussion group at http://groups.google.co.za/group/bika-health?hl=en. Please advise all interested labs to join. I hope you don't mind me also posting my reply to the group?

To summarise:

All Bika development work is taken on with client sponsorship. Though we have invested immensely as passionate and enthusiastic individuals, we have no war chest to take on development we identify as 'necessary'

After a long red tape battle we finally received a South African government grant from the department of trade and industry's special innovation program (SPII). Roughly 9 months ago and we are still waiting for the final contracts. And it does not stop there:

The biggest party of the grant will only be paid out at reaching our final milestone, an installed proto type. We already identified and started talks with one of the smaller commercial pathological labs in Cape Town to this purpose

The grant covers only 1 half of the the development cost and we need to provide prove that we'll be able to find funding for the rest. At this point we hope to do this from our commercial ventures in other lab disciplines

On the funding side thus we require:

Bridging finance of R 400 000 (approx $ 50 000) till the end of the project

Another R 400 000 sponsorship (or highly skilled Python, Django and Plone programming resources free of charge)

Bear in mind that the total development cost was capped at R 800 000 to stay within limits of the SPII grants and we'll probably not be able to include all the functionality, and especially serial interfaces, we would like to

Current 'readiness'

We are nevertheless working on our proto type at the moment again (thanks Campbell, I'll keep bringing beer, coffee, food and clean clothes, don't know what to do about grumpy girlfriend though;-) in preparation for the Fourth Annual OpenMRS Implementers Meeting, 13-17 September 2009, Cape Town where we hope to demo added sampling, sample partitioning and preservation workflows harvested from Bika Water 1, our upcoming first release for municipal water quality management sponsored by the City of uMhlathuze. As well as our patient module developed for the earlier prototype and first steps towards an OpenMRS interface

With a little bit of help, say $5000, i believe we can get this properly tested and debugged for a 0.2 release and scrutiny by the community. An early proto-type remains available on-line as Version 0.1. Please everybody let me know should you want credentials to look around but bear in mind that, though holding firm, it has not been stress tested at all

Thanks a lot, and best regards

Its a pleasure. Please inform me of any upcoming conferences where we can present the Bika Health case (St Kitts would've been great!-).  We can actually get government funding to attend these should we inform them long enough in advance (2 months) and manage to get listed on the program

lemoene
Director. Bika Health Foundation
www.bikalabs.org