The Bika Health Foundation was registered not for profit in August 2008 with official objective and principle recorded at the registrar as

Custodians of the Bika Health LIMS intellectual property, committed to keeping the program code freely available, nurturing the Bika Health LIMS community and sponsoring deserving Health initiatives

The Foundation's 5 founder members currently serve as directors and there are 2 Bika patron as additional members and shares the www.bikalabs.org web address with the rest of the Bika OS Community

The Foundation aims to invite academics, open source development communities, philanthropists and institutional role players alike to participate and sponsor development and distribution of public health laboratory systems

The Foundation's own 'product', the Bika Health LIMS, will be central in this endeavour and we are looking for approximately $100k to complete 1st phase development - it is currently available with added patient demographics only

Based on Bika's feature rich and industry proven LIMS for chemistry, Bika LIMS 2 Inkosi, it remains a tragedy that no client or other sponsorship could thus far be raised to complete the system for deployment in resource poor settings analysing specimen for HIV, Malaria, TB and cervical cancer where it is so desperately needed to alleviate unspeakable and often preventable suffering

The funds are needed for adaptation to health lab instrument interfaces and applying interoperability standards required for health applications. We are anxiously awaiting the outcome of an application to the SA government's innovation fund to kick-off this development. 'Marketing' to prospects for completion of the initial development continues

We hope to engage open source medical record keeping system developers and communities for the establishment of open interoperability standards and integrated roll-outs

The Health Foundation had its first public outing recently, successfully, at The 2nd Global LIS Conference in Hanoi, Vietnam. Attendance was sponsored by Bika Lab Systems. A conference report was subsequently posted at the Bika Health discussion group

We would like to thank all participants who made this bold move possible and we are looking forward to your ongoing support. Please continue to send us your suggestions and nominations for membership

The Bika Health Foundation team

registered not for profit 2008/008390/08

Directors: lemoene Smit, Jacob Tekane, Anneline Sweetnam

                Joris Goudriaan, Inus Scheepers

Additional members: Willem Scholtz, Jan-Willem Witte