Zimbabwe Bika Health building steam

Ambitiously hatched in 2014, the Bika Health project by the Zimbabwe Ministry of Health and Child Care overcame initial challenges and five provincial laboratories were implemented so far. Follow-up customisations are well under way. To improve prevention and care, the system is initially used to monitor HIV cases through early infant detection, but its scope is to expanded to include TB and other infectious diseases.


The implementations are part of the Zimbabwe Health Information and Support Project (ZimHISP) that strives to improve health service delivery through a national health information system and mobile disease reporting. Success of the LIMS project was achieved through big effort and Open Source buy-in by the MoHCC, the National Microbiology Reference Laboratory (NMRL), regional lab managers, and eventually the passion and sacrifices of the Bika LIMS analyst, developer and project manager collective, effectively co-sponsoring the project. Thanks Jordi, Pau, Ronald, Lemoene. NMRL lab and accreditation specialists were instrumental ensuring exemplary record keeping standards were maintained throughout the deployments. Analysing user skills and presenting on-site workshops on using Bika Health to improve and ease pressures brought on by the manual procedures being replaced, saw the system quickly adopted. Returning from an early site visit, Lemoene noted “the most qualified and skilled lab staff and enthusiastic future LIMS users in my whole career ever, they'll get ISO 15189 accreditation without breaking sweat".	Apart from poor Internet infrastructure - cellular networks are considered - the Zimbabwean LIS challenges are not unique to privately funded public health care projects, with unsustainable budgets, tight time constraints, heaps of admin, shortage of affordable experienced coders, inevitable scope creep, and the lack of central patient and health worker registries. The latter are under development and a very successful country wide District Health Information Software (DHIS) is used for epidemiological surveillance. Through the project, Bika Health gained much new functionality. Apart from additional instrument interfaces, Province and District differentiation, Lab departmental data and workflow segregation, specialised workflow and Reflex Testing for EID and VL labs, also improvements to list filtering and exports, the dashboard, results verification, sample rejection, analysis aggregation, multi-method instruments and worksheet templates. Bika Health's Patient demographics is used to maintain mother and child relationships and build up Case histories. A lot of work by Jordi and Pau (Naralabs) also went into performance improvements to facilitate the expected throughput of 10000 samples per month, refactoring catalogs and indexes, queries and object initialisation, and registering a big leap forward to beat the Plone power pig. In Bika 4 these enhancements will compliment massive strides made using ExtJS as front-end over Bika's JSON API under development by Ramon at Riding Bytes. The future is here!

The implementations are part of the Zimbabwe Health Information and Support Project (ZimHISP) that strives to improve health service delivery through a national health information system and mobile disease reporting.

Success of the LIMS project was achieved through big effort and Open Source buy-in by the MoHCC, the National Microbiology Reference Laboratory (NMRL), regional lab managers, and eventually the passion and sacrifices of the Bika LIMS analyst, developer and project manager collective, effectively co-sponsoring the project. Thanks Jordi, Pau, Ronald, Lemoene.

NMRL lab and accreditation specialists were instrumental ensuring exemplary record keeping standards were maintained throughout the deployments. Analysing user skills and presenting on-site workshops on using Bika Health to improve and ease pressures brought on by the manual procedures being replaced, saw the system quickly adopted.

Returning from an early site visit, Lemoene noted “the most qualified and skilled lab staff and enthusiastic future LIMS users in my whole career ever, they'll get ISO 15189 accreditation without breaking sweat".

Apart from poor Internet infrastructure - cellular networks are considered - the Zimbabwean LIS challenges are not unique to privately funded public health care projects, with unsustainable budgets, tight time constraints, heaps of admin, shortage of affordable experienced coders, inevitable scope creep, and the lack of central patient and health worker registries. The latter are under development and a very successful country wide District Health Information Software (DHIS) is used for epidemiological surveillance.

Through the project, Bika Health gained much new functionality. Apart from additional instrument interfaces, Province and District differentiation, Lab departmental data and workflow segregation, specialised workflow and Reflex Testing for EID and VL labs, also improvements to list filtering and exports, the dashboard, results verification, sample rejection, analysis aggregation, multi-method instruments and worksheet templates.

Bika Health's Patient demographics is used to maintain mother and child relationships and build up Case histories.

A lot of work by Jordi and Pau (Naralabs) also went into performance improvements to facilitate the expected throughput of 10000 samples per month, refactoring catalogs and indexes, queries and object initialisation, and registering a big leap forward to beat the Plone power pig. In Bika 4 these enhancements will compliment massive strides made using ExtJS as front-end over Bika's JSON API under development by Ramon at Riding Bytes.

The future is here!