Reflecting upon the past year, the OpenELIS Foundation is so grateful for all the opportunities we have had to strengthen relationships with current clients, build relationships with new Public Health partners, expand upon the services we offer and enhance functionality within OpenELIS. We have had the privilege to continue to support the Missouri State Public Health Laboratory (MSPHL), South Carolina Public Health Laboratory (SC PHL) and Guam Laboratory Services (GLS). The Iowa State Hygienic Laboratory development team has also been a great partner in assisting with the support of our clients.
We were fortunate to attend the APHL Annual Conference in Cleveland, Ohio in May and the APHL Annual Newborn Screening Symposium in Tacoma, Washington in October. We met many new public health partners at both events and we were also able to meet some new faces from public health labs in Missouri, South Carolina, Guam, and Iowa. The APHL Annual Conferences provide the OpenELIS Foundation a platform to talk with laboratory leadership, laboratorians, and other partners in the public health field as well as provides an opportunity for us to learn about the challenges each laboratory is facing.
Knowing that our Public Health Laboratory (PHL) partners require bi-directional instrument interfacing, we have been diligently working on a solution to offer our clients. Timely ordering and resulting to/from an instrument is critical to a PHL operation, especially in high throughput laboratory sections. We sincerely thank our current clients for their continued support in this large endeavor.
Another significant venture underway at the OpenELIS Foundation is infrastructure updates involved in deploying new releases to our clients, implementation of an agile project management tool, and development of a Service Desk. Our clients can use the Service Desk to submit support questions, request new features/functionalities for the application and to report bugs encountered while using OpenELIS.
The Inventory module within OpenELIS is also expanding. New screens are being developed that will allow our clients to manage their inventory more effectively. The new screens will allow laboratorians to monitor expiring and low stock items as well as easily add items to vendor and internal orders. Another new screen will allow the lab staff to issue inventory quickly through use of barcode scanning. Enhancements are also being made to current inventory screens to expand their functionality.
The OpenELIS Foundation is excited for the new projects that are scheduled and anticipated new partnerships in 2023!