This award puts the spotlight on laboratories that have successfully collaborated with the public sector.

This year the development of relationships and solutions towards a common goal has been more important than ever before. Clinisys UK won this award for the SI-DEP project – the IT that lies at the heart of France’s national Covid-19 screening platform.

“The speed of ramp up of this highly accurate new service was hugely impressive. The work that has been done to get vaccines out to the public in the UK has been widely recognised as a brilliant success, but Clinisys’ software systems made it possible to join up the labs and the GPs in record time to cope with the huge upswing in demand for tests. This UK based company is exporting it’s know-how throughout Europe, improving health services for hundreds of millions.” –  Jacqueline Balian, Head of Laboratories, Test and Measurement Sectors at GAMBICA

Clinisys UK provided the IT that lies at the heart of SI-DEP – France’s national Covid-19 screening platform.

Putting in place a large-scale virological screening at the national level, in order to control and limit a pandemic rebound and to accurately steer the momentum of contamination throughout the country, requires the ability to identify, test and isolate patients and their contacts.

This high-priority public interest mission was based on a partnership between the French Ministry of Health and Solidarity, the AP-HP (Assistance Publique – Hôpitaux de Paris hospital group) and the French public health authority (Santé publique France), together with medical laboratories and laboratory information system providers.

In order to digitise this screening process, SI-DEP offers a secure platform for the registration and transmission of Covid-19 test results, making it possible to ensure the proper handling of positive cases. Through the real-time, comprehensive, and immediate collection of results, it aims to break the chain of contamination.

Clinisys UK’s provided a multi-facility, multi-LIS electronic requesting tool. Centralising all results from PCR and serological screening across the entire country (public and private) in a national database. Data is hosted by AP-HP and all operational handling is carried out in compliance with the GDPR and the French National Commission on Information Technology and Liberties (CNIL). The system provided quality, consolidated and pseudonymised data in real time for the French public health authority (Santé publique France), the Directorate for Research, Studies, Evaluation and Statistics (DREES) and the Health Data Hub platform, for statistical and epidemiological monitoring purposes and enabled secure sharing of results with requestors and patients (who can thus immediately take preventative measures), and the implementation of unique QR activation codes for the French TousAntiCovid application.

The SI-DEP project went live on 13th May 2020, handling some 50,000 test results per day in the early stages. Over time, this has gradually grown to more than 1,000,000 daily tests, and the number is due to increase further.