During July – September 2021 BV had conducted PACS implementation activities at the recently created Pathogens’ Museum of Pathogens Registration Department of Azerbaijan Food Safety Institute’s Complex Investigations Laboratory (AFSI-CILPRD). The implementation was initiated by request from AFSI leadership in early 2021.
Considering the biosecurity level of AFSI-CILPRD, PACS implementation was performed according to the isolated network concept, which means that installed network is not connected neither to the internet nor to the site’s internal network.
The PACS at AFSI-CILPRD museum mostly being used as an inventory system for pathogens stored at the museum’s repository. At the same time all operations performed with these pathogens in lab space are also being tracked via PACS.
The interesting thing here is that almost all operations from PACS are being used by PACS users to track their routine procedures with pathogens: Batch Material Registration, Dilution, Subculturing, Aliquoting, Diagnostics, Material Destruction, Aliquot movement. As it was initially discussed with personnel, other PACS operations will be also used for different purposes in the future.
What is curious about this implementation, that considering that this is a new facility unit at an AFSI, without ready SOPs for their business procedures and approved forms, because of OJT training, their personnel (PACS Admins) were able to quickly register in the system all pathogens stored in the museum. This procedure took several weeks and PACS significantly helped them during this work to go through whole inventory process of their repository and recover necessary information about these materials. Now, all pathogens stored in AFSI-CILPRD freezers are labeled with 2D QR-code. The Materials Summary report is being used to print the list of currently stored materials with quantity of aliquots per material at the end of each business day.
PACS system allows AFSI-CILPRD to quickly find out the information on requested pathogens, their location and the history of the operations performed with them. At the same time PACS provides an opportunity to register new materials with full systematic information and provide data about operations conducted with materials according to recently developed procedures.
At the present time BV jointly with AFSI-CILPRD PACS Main Admin are working on the specific PACS SOP, where not only daily procedures, but also additional operations and configurations will be described in Appendices. This could be used by PACS Admins for different cases and system configuration procedures without BTRP involvement in the future. PACS Admins are also going to submit tickets to EIDSS & PACS Helpdesk to register several issues and ideas that they think could help to improve PACS operations for their usage.
The PACS system is being used now as AFSI-CILPRD’s unique system for Pathogens’ inventory and tracking, which covers critical need in quick retrieving of data of all pathogens from their repository. The success of this rapid implementation of PACS at AFSI-CILPRD is largely attributed to their aspiration to have an inventory system to maintain the principles of biosafety and biosecurity at a high level.
