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Built for the programs you're accountable for
OpenELIS Global is open-source laboratory infrastructure proven at national scale — chosen by ministries and funders for its cost, sovereignty, evidence base, and sustainability, not just its features.
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Why open, and why OpenELIS
Why open source
No licensing fees, no vendor to renew with, no contract to exit. The source is public — free to inspect, adapt, and audit under the Mozilla Public License. Your budget goes to people, training, and laboratories, and your system and your data are yours to keep, at any time.
Why open standards
FHIR R4 native across patients, samples, and results. ASTM and HL7 v2.5 for analyzer connectivity through configuration, not custom code. LOINC and SNOMED for terminology. Aligned with OpenHIE — your laboratory speaks the same language as the rest of your health system.
What makes OpenELIS special
15+ years running national laboratory networks. Peer-reviewed evidence of measurable outcomes. The only open-source LIMS that consolidates clinical, environmental, and vector surveillance on one platform — One Health from day one.
What it costs — and what's not the catch
OpenELIS is free of licensing fees under the Mozilla Public License. No per-user costs, no annual renewals, no vendor lock-in. Your budget goes to implementation and local capacity — not to a software vendor. And because it's open source and self-hosted, there's no contract to renew and no exit penalty: you can take your system and your data and go, at any time.
What you're inheriting, free
$34 million of engineering, already built
Building a laboratory system like OpenELIS from scratch would take a large software team the better part of a decade. A country adopting OpenELIS inherits all of it, ready to run — so the budget goes into people, training, and laboratories instead of into software.
Independent COCOMO II analysis of the codebase; figures vary with assumptions.
Your data stays yours
Data sovereignty
Self-hosted on your infrastructure. Patient and surveillance data never leave your servers or your country — no cloud dependency, no third-party data processor.
No lock-in
Open standards, open source, open exit. FHIR-native data and a documented schema mean you're never trapped in a proprietary format.
Works where you work
Docker deployment on modest hardware, offline-first operation, and tolerance for intermittent connectivity — built for real low-resource settings.
Proven at national scale — and measured
OpenELIS isn't a pilot. It has run national laboratory networks for over a decade across 26+ countries including Côte d'Ivoire, Haiti, Mauritius, Vietnam, and Indonesia. During the COVID-19 pandemic, Mauritius's national system absorbed a 4,000% surge in testing volume and is estimated to have saved ~$4.5M versus commercial alternatives. Read the Mauritius case study →
And the outcomes are documented in the peer-reviewed literature. A 2024 study in JMIR Public Health & Surveillance examined 21 clinical laboratories in Côte d'Ivoire and found that laboratory data timeliness and completeness improved measurably following OpenELIS implementation — the kind of independent evidence funders and program reviewers look for.
Fits your standards and your architecture
Security & accreditation
Role-based access control, full audit logging, SSO (Keycloak / SAML / OAuth2), encryption at rest and in transit. Designed to support ISO 15189 accreditation and WHO SLIPTA improvement pathways.
National-architecture ready
FHIR R4 native, with proven connections to EMRs (OpenMRS, iSantePlus), DHIS2, SORMAS, and national health information exchanges. Aligned with the OpenHIE / digital-public-goods architecture.
One Health consolidation
Human, animal/vector, and environmental surveillance on one platform — one system to fund, one team to train, one accreditation to maintain instead of three.
Backed to last
The biggest risk with open-source software is abandonment. OpenELIS is stewarded by the Digital Initiatives Group (DIGI), part of the University of Washington's Department of Global Health — so it draws on the full weight of a leading public research university, with expertise spanning medicine, public health, and computer science, and the research rigor to match. It's deployed by ministries of health across 26+ countries and aligned with multilateral partners including WHO and UNICEF, with funding from a range of public-health institutions rather than any single donor. Developed in the open with a public roadmap and continuous releases, it's infrastructure you can build a national program on and expect to be maintained for years to come.
Note: AI-assisted reporting (Catalyst) is on the public roadmap and in active development — a look at where the platform is heading, not a dependency for the value described above.
Evaluating OpenELIS for your country?
We'll walk your team through deployment models, evidence, and total cost of ownership for your context.
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