Accelerating Testing for COVID-19 at Dedicated Facilities in Gulf Region

hands shown working in a lab on a COVID test

From Nasser Saleh, InterSystems Middle East

InterSystems partnered with Pure Health, the largest laboratory operator in the Gulf Cooperation Council, to deploy the InterSystems TrakCare Lab Enterprise system to support the United Arab Emirates’ (UAE’s) testing initiatives for COVID-19. Pure Health is a pioneering healthcare solutions provider and the largest laboratory network in the entire Gulf region, with 115 labs and 750 healthcare professionals employed across the UAE.

Under this initiative, the TrakCare Lab Enterprise system was implemented in a record two weeks’ time to enable Pure Health to streamline testing workflows and make data easily accessible from all parties, thereby accelerating testing for COVID-19 in the UAE. Pure Health has two dedicated COVID-19 testing laboratories in the emirates of Abu Dhabi and Sharjah and is opening an additional laboratory in Dubai soon. With this, the organization will have the largest COVID-19 testing capability in the Middle East, with the capacity to perform 25,000 tests daily.

Pure Health has been collaborating with healthcare providers and authorities in this screening initiative across the UAE and conducted COVID-19 tests at more than 15 collection centers and two processing locations. It will soon increase capacity to 75,000 daily COVID-19 tests. As of April 7, the UAE Ministry of Health and Prevention had conducted 593,095 screenings for the coronavirus, out of which 259,000 tests were performed by Pure Health. This puts the UAE’s efforts at around 60,000 tests per 1 million people — one of the highest testing density standards in the world.

Conducting a high volume of COVID-19 PCR (polymerase chain reaction) tests daily is instrumental in combating the COVID-19 pandemic, and TrakCare Lab Enterprise can manage tens of thousands of PCR tests daily. This high-throughput processing capability helps accelerate the diagnosis and identification of suspected COVID-19 cases, the release of recovered patients, and the screening of close contacts and high-risk groups.

^{This story originally appeared the April 17, 2020- OnTrak News Flash No.2: The Fight Against COVID-19 newsletter}