Funding

The LIMS should help you keep the grant, not consume it.

Conrad tags volume, TAT, surge throughput, and interoperability work to ELC and PHEP categories. He never submits a report to CDC alone.

What maps to which grant

Interoperability, ELR/eCR, surge testing, data modernization

Emergency preparedness, continuity, high-consequence pathogen readiness

Infrastructure, workforce, vocabulary, cloud operations

Software license is $0 for qualified PHLs. Hosting and implementation are the billable lines.

Illustrative access-program shape. Not a quote, and not a promise that any federal program will reimburse 100% of costs.

Software license

Waived for qualified public health laboratories under the 501(c)(3) access program. Not a limited trial.

Maintenance / registry

$7,500 / yr

Platform updates, vocabulary maintenance, and community registry access. Illustrative base, not a quote.

Hosting allocation

$15,000 / yr

Governed Snowflake compute and storage baseline with quarterly true-ups on actual throughput.

Hosting scales with throughput. The software license stays $0 for qualified PHLs. Implementation is one-time and size-dependent.

Annual specimens: 120,000Annual reportable tests: 180,000

Year-one shape

180,000 reportable observations/year is the volume Conrad has to keep coded if ELC completeness is the metric your bureau chief actually reads.

Legacy answers versus the Salus pitch. Still decision support. Still a human on the pen.

What directors ask	Legacy LIMS	Salus
We do not have IT staff to maintain servers.	Pay a professional-services retainer to keep the database alive.	BYO-Snowflake or hosted Snowflake. The application layer is stateless. Agents do not replace your Snowflake admin of record.
What happens when the next outbreak hits?	Submit a change order to build new accessioning forms.	Install a coded pack from the registry. Conrad drafts bulk accessioning. The kill switch stays with the supervisor.
Will we lose control of our data?	No, but it is trapped in a proprietary schema.	You own the tenant. Full-fidelity export is a button. Data never has to leave the jurisdiction to use the LIMS.
How do we prove value to state leadership?	Export CSV files and rebuild the charts in Excel.	Command center, coded ELR completeness, and grant-tagged throughput. Conrad drafts the justification. A human still signs.