For years, lengthy delays in testing sexual assault kits left victims in limbo — unable to learn whether evidence that passes from nurses to police to labs and back has made it through the system or slipped through the cracks.

The Tennessee Bureau of Investigation now reports a new database giving victims real time updates on sexual assault evidence is fully operational, logging 3,036 kits since going online in July of last year.

The agency has yet to train all of the state’s 600 law enforcement agencies in the new database, a web portal that requires police, hospitals and laboratories to log dates to mark the path of a rape kit throughout the chain of command.

But Donna Nelson, a TBI crime lab regional supervisor based in Jackson who spearheaded implementation of the so-called SAMS-Track system, said lab personnel ensure that each time an officer brings a kit to a state labs without having entered it into the database, training is immediately offered at the lab. Thus far, 248 law enforcement agencies have submitted kits using the SAMS-Track system since the 2022 law creating the database.