The withdrawal of funding from public health is exerting a substantial impact on the system’s ability to deliver essential services. This means tightened budgets and shifting priorities. What, however, is clear: it has become more difficult than ever to fund and maintain the systems and tools that keep our public health infrastructure and its services running.
At the OpenELIS Foundation, we understand these constraints—and we’ve shaped our work accordingly.
Focused Development with Real Impact
Attempting everything often results in doing nothing well. Instead, we’re refining and strengthening the areas and tools where we know we can deliver the greatest value for public health laboratories. Even in a difficult environment, we remain committed to developing tools that have the biggest impact on public health laboratories as a whole.
Over the past months, we’ve continued development on key enhancements that benefit our community of laboratories:
- Environmental Test Ordering using the Web Portal
We are expanding OpenELIS to support environmental test ordering, making it easier for labs to manage workflows and for partners to submit test orders through a secure online portal. - Test Definition Redesign, Phase 2
Building on earlier work, we’re moving forward with enhancing microbiology workflows, enabling labs to visualize internal testing processes and track detailed testing steps that were once tracked outside of the system. - Instrument Interface Enhancements
Pushing beyond just file-based interactions. We’re developing a method for the instrument interface to use standard communication protocols that allows instruments to “talk” directly to the instrument interface. For file-based instruments, we are automating the instrument interface to process the files received from the instrument to reduce manual steps for lab staff.
An Affordable, Collaborative Alternative
Given current funding restrictions, many state and local laboratories are reconsidering what LIMS they can afford to adopt or maintain. OpenELIS may be of particular interest right now, because we offer a sustainable, customizable solution that can be configured to meet a lab’s needs. We prioritize extensibility, laboratory control and affordability.
Looking Ahead
Challenges come and eventually go. We believe it's still essential to move forward—to keep building and innovating solutions that drive progress where it's needed most.. In this environment, we remain committed to working alongside our partners to keep public health lab infrastructure moving forward.
Together, we can build solutions that are resilient, cost-effective and responsive to the ever-changing needs of the communities we serve.