A new Open Source software tool to manage blood service data in low resource settings
Cape Town, South Africa – 11 December 2013 – The Jembi team, together with our partners Safe Blood for Africa and the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), demonstrated the organisation’s new
BSIS software to groups representing the National Blood Services of Lesotho, Malawi and Zambia. BSIS is a low cost open source software for managing data related to the collection, screening, storage and issuance of donated blood. Originally developed as a research and development project by students in the Computing for Good (C4G) course at the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta, BSIS is being taken to the next level by Jembi in preparation for roll-out in a number of African countries.
“The demonstrations were really a public debut for BSIS,” said John Pitman, a health scientist at CDC, which is funding the project through the U.S. President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR). “For the last several years development has been taking place in an academic environment, which has been a great way to test new ideas and challenge young software developers with this pressing public health question. Moving the project from the R&D environment and into a real-world simulation lab, and eventually on to field testing in several countries, is a huge step forward.”
For the programme team ‘The demo of the BSIS application was very exciting, seeing representatives from the three the countries engage with an evolving tool was encouraging and will ensure that the system we are creating will really meet countries’ needs. I’m looking forward to seeing the software in the field and the team working with countries to strengthen Blood Services.’ Carl Fourie, Assistant Director of Programmes at Jembi Health Systems,
Learn more: Blood Safety Strengthening Project (BSSP)
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