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"If you don't get the lab results right, the doctor is acting blindly and people die."
The words of Dr. Rosemary Keatley, a leading medical practitioner and gynecologist in Ghana, ring true anywhere in the world, but they were particularly poignant in that West African nation at the turn of the century.
Dr. Keatley graduated from Cambridge University Medical School and then held a Post-Doctoral Fellowship at Stanford University Medical Center. Dr. Keatley and her husband, a business executive named Mark Keatley, moved their family to Ghana in 1994, so that their children could grow up in her native land.
Dr. Keatley had intended to open a gynecological practice in Ghana's capital city of Accra, but she changed course after being approached to become the resident doctor for the American Peace Corps, attached to the US Embassy.
While working at the Peace Corps, Dr. Keatley read a CDC report that said that more than 80% of the lab tests done by Ghanaian labs were unreliable. Each embassy and major corporation therefore operated their own laboratory, to better service their own employees.
Dr. Keatley understood that laboratory and imaging—the ability to see into a body chemically and microscopically in the lab, and via radiation in imaging—were what distinguished the art of medicine from the science of medicine. Without these foundational abilities, modern medical science in Ghana was crippled. Dr. Keatley observed that there were more Ghanaian doctors in New York City than there were in Ghana—and that none of them would return to their country without having a medical infrastructure in place there.
In 2000, the Keatleys grasped an opportunity to address this critical issue. They acquired a small, clinical outpatient laboratory which had opened in 1995: Medlab Ghana.
By 2010, Medlab Ghana had outgrown its original paper-based model. Dr. Keatley knew that Medlab needed a laboratory information system (LIS), but at first, she could not find one that met her criteria of both high functionality and a reasonable price.
Through an extensive international search, Medlab discovered CGM SCHUYLAB, then owned by Schuyler House, and contacted the company. In 2011, CGM SCHUYLAB was installed at Medlab.
The tools offered by CGM SCHUYLAB improved efficiency in Dr. Keatley's lab, while CGM SCHUYNET provided crucial result delivery in a country where the physical delivery of lab results is sometimes difficult.
After outgrowing its paper-based systems, Medlab outgrew its own walls, expanding to to include six satellite labs across Ghana. The main laboratory in Accra expanded to include a radiology department that reportedly had the first privately-owned CT scanner and mammography practice in Ghana.
In 2015, as part of succession planning, Dr. Keatley sought an international partnership with a clinical lab services group. This led Medlab to merge with Synlab, the largest reference laboratory company in Europe, which acquired majority ownership in 2015 and full ownership in 2020.
Dr. Keatley then became one of the founding board members of the Healthcare Foundation of Ghana (HFG).
In 2021, in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, Dr. Keatley saw that Ghana's government-owned virology labs urgently needed a laboratory information system (LIS) to cope with the huge volume of COVID-19 testing and to enable the Ministry of Health to manage Ghana's response to the pandemic.
On behalf of HFG, Rosemary and Mark helped empower the Noguchi Memorial Institute for Medical Research at the University of Ghana to implement CGM SCHUYLAB. Noguchi is Ghana's leading biomedical research institute. Its virology department has the capacity to perform 4,300 tests per day: more than half of the overall COVID-19 testing in Ghana at the height of the pandemic. By implementing CGM SCHUYLAB in 2021, Noguchi was able to improve its COVID-19 testing capacity by 50 percent.
In a 2022 update, HFG had this to say about CGM SCHUYLAB:
In 2022, CGM SCHUYLAB was also installed at Kumasi Center for Collaborative Research, which was the second largest COVID tester in Ghana, running 1,500 tests per day at the height of the pandemic.
With the vision and leadership of Dr. Rosemary Keatley, the country's lab results have become more reliable, doctors are no longer operating blind, and patients—most importantly—are reaping the rewards.
As this growing partnership approaches the 15-year mark, CompuGroup Medical is proud to be part of improving the medical infrastructure of Ghana.
