The African Society for Laboratory Medicine (ASLM) is a Pan-African professional body working with countries to advocate for the critical role and needs of laboratory medicine. Since its inception in 2011, ASLM has focused on building capacity in African healthcare laboratories. To this end, ASLM has leapfrogged over many traditional barriers to adoption of medical technology, enabling medical labs in Africa to benefit from state-of-the-art software solutions that power some of the largest laboratories in America.
ASLM has now partnered with SoftTech Health in a program to network the laboratories continent-wide with the LabQMS (Quality Management Software). The first site for the new partnership was the KEMRI/CDC HIVR lab in Kenya. “The SoftTech system is transforming the Kenya Medical Research Institute/CDC HIV Research lab into a paperless, efficiency-driven organization, making critical information available instantly. The user friendliness and ease of access of all critical SOPs and publications, including creation and recording of information [online forms], performing audits, and generating automated tasks with reminders is saving an enormous amount of time,” says Dr. Clement Zeh, Director of the KEMRI/CDC HIVR lab.
“By skipping over the traditional processes of establishing physical infrastructural technologies, and going directly to wireless and cloud-based technologies instead, we’re helping labs in Africa to use the same software tools that top labs in America use,” says Craig Madison, Senior Partner of SoftTech Health. “This program is Proof of Concept that intelligently and selectively deploying the right technologies pays real dividends. We’ve seen the laboratory sites in Kenya very readily transitioning to using software to improve quality and efficiency.” Learn more about ASLM.
