As part of the contribution towards the national response to the COVID-19 pandemic, A*STAR set up the Stronghold Diagnostics Laboratory (SDL), a MOH licensed clinical laboratory for high throughput COVID-19 testing. POLARIS members joined SDL as volunteers, and together with volunteers from several A*STAR Research Institutes, successfully established SDL as a clinical laboratory. POLARIS with its years of experience in clinical environment, instrument and system integration with LIMS, played a key role in ensuring that proper protocols were in place for sample delivery and receiving, sample processing and traceability, result reporting and personnel safety.
Due to the urgent requirements to (a) ramp up sample volume for testing and (b) regularly update COVID-19 test results to MOH, POLARIS volunteers SDL instrumentally established the use of Laboratory Information Management Systems (LIMS) with integration to the National Electronic Health Record (NEHR) and COVID-19 database, enabling real-time results contribution. SDL now processes several thousand samples daily with results transmitted to NEHR automatically resulting in fast-turn-around time (TAT), one of the important components in fighting COVID-19 virus spread.