Whole hospital workflow mapping at ANGAU and its implications for configuration

The engagement with ANGAU Memorial Provincial Hospital began as a clinical pilot, scoped to Emergency, Registration and Admissions, and then the wards.

Moana Digital Health mapped every department to document how work actually moves through the hospital, which frequently differs from written policy.

Two developments followed that were not in the original plan.

Requests from outside the clinical scope

Catering and Maintenance approached Moana directly, having heard about the work with the clinical teams.

Catering asked for ward nurses to place inpatient meal orders with dietary requirements attached, and for invoices to go directly to the hospital’s finance office. Maintenance asked for any department to be able to raise a job from its own dashboard into a single queue.

Neither request is clinical, but both address the problem clinicians also face: the same information recorded repeatedly on separate paper forms.

Preserving established processes

The Cancer Department works from a national registry form that follows a patient from registration to follow up. The form is effective; its limitation is that it is held in a filing cabinet.

Moana left the department’s process unchanged and configured the form in the system, so that the registry is compiled as care is delivered.

Implications for configuration

Configuration is no longer treated as a final phase. Each department’s workflow is built with that department before work moves to the next, so that when the system goes into use it already reflects how the hospital operates.

For health system leaders planning an electronic health record, the implication is that mapping should extend to the whole facility. Departments outside the original scope document are often the clearest test of whether a system serves the hospital as a whole.