Moana Digital Health presents at the Pacific Health Information Network webinar

Moana Digital Health presented at the Pacific Health Information Network (PHIN) webinar on digital health in the Pacific. The presentation addressed a consistent feature of island health systems: clinical data is collected, but it does not move between the facilities and programmes that need it.

Conditions in island health systems

Health services in the Pacific operate in conditions that most clinical software is not designed for:

• Populations dispersed across many islands
• A small health workforce
• Internet connections that are slow or intermittent
• Paper registers for most clinical and reporting work
• Reporting systems that do not exchange data with one another

As a result, a patient’s history depends on where their file is kept, monthly figures are tallied by hand, and ministries of health learn of public health problems late, from figures that are already out of date.

Standards first

PHIN is building digital health capacity and shared interoperability standards across the region. That work is important, because a national system built on named standards can exchange data with other systems rather than becoming another isolated one.

Moana records clinical data against those standards, including HL7 FHIR R4, ICD 10 and LOINC, so that information recorded in a clinic can be shared and reported without being entered again.

One record per patient

The presentation argued for starting with the clinical record rather than with another reporting tool. In Moana:

• Doctors see the patient’s full history in one place
• Nurses record vitals, care tasks and medicines administered against the same record
• Laboratories return results to the record that ordered them
• Pharmacies dispense against the prescription, with interaction checks
• Administrators see beds, appointments and patient flow as they change

The visit runs as one sequence: registration, consultation, laboratory and imaging orders, results, prescribing, treatment, and discharge with follow up. Each step is recorded once, by the person carrying it out.

Hospital operations

The same platform covers the operational side of a facility: staff rosters, bed and ward occupancy, appointments, billing and invoicing, and reports. With these held alongside clinical care, a facility manager does not need a separate system to know bed availability.

Designed for the conditions

Moana is designed for unreliable connectivity. When the connection drops, work is saved on the device and synchronised when the connection returns. The platform is designed to be learned quickly by frontline staff, to scale from a single clinic to a national system, and to be owned by the government that operates it.

Conclusion

The presentation concluded that island health systems need fewer systems, properly connected, with data recorded once at the point of care and reported from there.

About Moana Digital Health

Moana Digital Health builds the electronic health record and national health information systems for health systems in low and middle income countries. The Moana platform connects clinics, hospitals, laboratories, pharmacies and ministries of health on a single clinical record, with national surveillance, medical supply and clinical research systems built on top. It is designed for unreliable connectivity and coded to international standards including FHIR R4, ICD 10, SNOMED CT and LOINC.