BES is working with the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) Pacific Sub-Regional Office (PSRO), to support the ‘Transformative Agenda for Women Adolescents and Youth in the Pacific’. The Transformative Agenda (TA) programme invests in improving sexual and reproductive health in six priority countries: Fiji, Kiribati, Samoa, Solomon Islands, Tonga and Vanuatu.

UNFPA is using Tupaia to build a real-time, regional map of reproductive health services and commodities. In Tupaia, data is coming in from multiple sources to populate visuals showing information important to planning reproductive health services. This allows regional bodies to target services and resources to the areas of the greatest need, with a focus on supply chain strengthening.

The programme seeks to reduce unmet family planning needs in the Pacific, with three identified programme outcomes: increased and improved supply of integrated sexual and reproductive health (SRH) information and services, particularly for family planning; increased demand for integrated SRH information and services, particularly for family planning; and a more conducive and supportive environment for people to access and benefit from quality SRH, especially contraceptive choice.

How does it work?

Every health facility across countries was surveyed initially to provide a baseline level of information on the availability of reproductive health commodities, equipment, medicines, human resources and services. This data was imported into Tupaia and is built upon yearly, when each facility is again surveyed during a National tour.

During these tours, our mobile data collection app Tupaia MediTrak is used to collect updated data from the health facilities, allowing graphs over time to show any progress as to the improvement of services, or to direct where further support would be of benefit. The data can be shown at facility level, or aggregated to give an overall view of how a district or province or country is tracking.

Included in this data collection process is an ongoing import of data into Tupaia on staff training. This includes information on which facilities have had staff attend trainings and what they have been trained on, to help address training gaps where they exist in provinces or facilities to ensure all women have access to a facility with sufficiently trained staff.

On Tupaia, you can see exactly what supplies each clinic has in stock

Through Tupaia, we have data coming into the reproductive health platform about family planning commodity availability for those countries that use the stock management system mSupply (Kiribati, Solomon Islands, Vanuatu, and Tonga) at the national medicines warehouse.

BES also supported the roll out of mSupply at the UNFPA central warehouse in Suva, Fiji. From this warehouse, Pacific Island Countries can order required family planning commodities, and now the warehouse is able to use the forecasting, tender and procurement functions in mSupply to ensure there is always sufficient stock to meet these needs.

What this means is that stakeholders can look at Tupaia and quickly identify the supplies that are available at each health facility across all six countries in the region. One facility may have condoms and IUDs but is running low on emergency contraceptives. Another facility nearby may have plenty of emergency contraceptives, but no services for pregnancy testing and insufficient condoms available.

The availability of country level stock status information from mSupply allows UNFPA to detect regional supply issues, country level supply issues and sub national bottle necks and provide support and advice as required. Next steps for this project include adding live information on the availability of items at the Fiji warehouse to Tupaia, so there is oversight at each country level on the availability of items within the Pacific.

In Tonga, the Reproductive Health team in the Ministry of Health can view the UNFPA reproductive health module described above, as well as other important data they need to support decision making and reporting – all within Tupaia. Tonga uses Tupaia to display Health Information System (DHIS2) data (such as contraceptive prevalence rate), and this data is captured at the facility level using Tupaia MediTrak. We thus have a growing workforce of people becoming adept at using the MediTrak data collection tool and using Tupaia to view a range of health data, so staff need only learn to navigate a single system to collect and view the data they need.

In Kiribati, the physical monitoring and the monthly review of mSupply reports have contributed to increasing the share of health facilities with no stockouts of any contraceptives from 2 per cent in 2019 to 67 per cent in 2020. Not just that, but data indicates the increased use of family planning commodities and a rise in couple-years protection.

The future of reproductive health in the Pacific

The long-term impact this project strives for is greater oversight as to the availability of reproductive health services in each of the participating countries. Countries will be able to use Tupaia to show where, for example, facilities offer family planning services, and where there are gaps in the family planning commodities available to support the offering of these services – and support Ministries of Health to plan to rectify these discrepancies.

The overall aim is to improve service availability to all women living in the 8 participating countries by ensuring they have the commodities, equipment and staff available to meet family planning and reproductive health needs.

Want to learn more about Tupaia? Visit our product page here.

Want to explore the data yourself? Check out tupaia.org

Against the backdrop of their door-to-door COVID-19 vaccine campaign, there is also an impressive rollout of a national typhoid vaccine campaign.

Typhoid is endemic in Samoa, with an estimated 270 cases per 100,000 each year. For reference, a high endemic area is defined as more than 100 cases per 100,000 each year. Only a few countries globally have a higher incidence rate of typhoid than Samoa. Currently TCV, a highly effective single-dose vaccine, is not part of the routine immunization program.

But the hope is that is about to change. Since August 2021, Samoa has launched a campaign to vaccinate all Samoans between 1 to 45 years old.

As with many immunization campaigns, time is of the essence. The vaccines used in Samoa’s campaign have already been donated, so its vital that they are distributed and put to use before they expire.

That’s where Tamanu comes in.

Tamanu is an open-source patient-level electronic medical record system designed specifically for the Pacific region. It has already been upgraded to support an immunization model; currently in use to support the COVID-19 vaccine campaign, Tamanu has been used to record 196,578 vaccinations in Samoa to date.

For three weeks in August, nurses travelled to schools in the greater Apia urban area to vaccinate all the students. Ten teams of two nurses per team attend four schools each day. While one nurse gives the vaccination, the other finds and checks the student’s patient information in Tamanu and records the vaccination details in the system, including date of vaccination, batch number, and injection site.

Every effort is taken to ensure maximum efficiency of the operation, and that nothing goes to waste. An open vial can be used for up to six hours after opening when stored at +2°C to +8°C, and each team has an esky on hand to maintain temperatures of the doses.

“It’s tiring work vaccinating so many children per day, and it’s really hot, but it’s important we get it all done before the vaccines overheat” – Faamamafa (RN)

Each team vaccinates up to 200 students per day, and no one is left behind. Nurses record absent students so they can advise them to present to the hospital clinic, or so they can be captured in next year’s school vaccine drive.

The excitement amongst the students is palpable. All of the children sit and watch as each student gets called – some cry, others laugh, all are excited to be missing class, and all acknowledge the importance of getting vaccinated.

Digitisation of Samoa’s health system

“It’s so much faster than writing down” – Teuila Pati, EPI Coordinator RN

This is the first use of technology on the ground in this situation. Previously, patient details would be handwritten in consultation books, including name, gender, date of birth, village, mothers name, and contact details. Then, the senior nurse would spend weeks typing all the information into an Excel spreadsheet.

This system of manual data entry is time-consuming and prone to errors. Small mistakes can create delays, leaving children at greater risk of contracting vaccine-preventable diseases if not immunised effectively. Data inaccuracies also make planning difficult, leading to poor management of vaccine stocks and overall lack of efficiency. By inputting patient information directly into Tamanu, which syncs the centralised patient registry across all devices, the risk of data entry errors is greatly reduced.

Parents are keen for their children to be protected through vaccination too. All parents are present at the school with children and bring the signed consent forms and their immunisation records. In future, the printed immunization books will be unnecessary as patient information can be recorded in Tamanu and accessed by their healthcare providers.

The future of Tamanu in Samoa

Training for nurses was a key component of the national typhoid vaccine rollout. Once familiar with Tamanu, all training RNs get to work in the field and assist with data entry as part of their training.

“Trainee nurses are the way of the future, and it is so great that they get to use Tamanu and be familiar with it for when it is rolled out further across health centres” – Teuila Pati, EPI Coordinator RN

Tamanu is also supporting other public health campaigns across the country. At the moment, it is used for PEN Fa’a Samoa school nurse program. In this intervention, students’ nutritional status is assessed and monitored at schools, allowing school nurses to enrol them in health promotion programs as required.

Following the success of Tamanu for typhoid and COVID-19 vaccination campaigns in Samoa, the EMR will continue to support public health campaigns across the country. Tamanu will be expanded to be used for all routine vaccinations including BCG, DTP Booster, bOPV, PCV13, Rotavirus, Td Booster, TCV Typhoid, MMR, Hep B, IPV, Pentavalent and OPV Booster.

If you’re interested in learning more about how our tools can support vaccine & mass drug administration programs, you can learn more about Tamanu, explore our maps on Tupaia, or reach out to the team at Beyond Essential Systems.

Tamanu is a patient-level electronic medical record (EMR) designed for both desktop and mobile. It enables health workers to track individual patients, provide clinical support and ensure consistent management of patients through the continuum of care. The system is offline-first, with syncing capabilities, allowing users to work seamlessly in both offline and online modes so they can easily work in the most remote locations.

We knew when COVID-19 started to affect Pacific Island Countries that Tamanu was positioned to assist not only in the initial response but in delivering vaccinations. When Samoa approached Beyond Essential Systems (BES), we were ready to assist. We had the core software ready to deploy but acknowledged that for software to translate to valuable patient and health system outcomes there was more work to do.

We immediately embarked on a process to rapidly but carefully adapt Tamanu to the evolving Samoan situation. With travel all but impossible an additional challenge was providing international software technical support remotely.

The success of this process has both highlighted Tamanu as a Pacific-owned product but also challenged our usual operating model. Tamanu’s design and implementation has been locally driven; the Samoan Ministry of Health has successfully rolled out cutting edge, fit-for-purpose, open-source software in the midst of a pandemic.

The system is now being used to successfully track the COVID-19 vaccine roll-out for all vaccine recipients.

Vaccinations started on the 18th of April, with over 10,000 entries made into the system in the first 3 weeks, The program continues to accelerate, and to date 25,040 people have received their first dose of the COVID-19 vaccine.

All 215,000 people in Samoa were pre-entered into Tamanu and can be found using their first name, last name, DOB, village or ID. The system is being used to record information for each of these individuals receiving a vaccine. Tamanu captures essential details on the vaccine used, batch, injection site and the team administering the dose, provides decision support and can be used to record adverse events for individuals.
The data from each individual is then deidentified and aggregated into Tupaia, BES’ data aggregation, analysis and visualisation platform that

helps map health systems in low and middle-income countries. The platform is used to track the vaccine roll-out in real-time across metrics such as % coverage (to the village level), age and sex summaries.

What is unique about Tamanu’s functionality is that data can be entered on a desktop application, but most entries are via our mobile application, which teams can use out in the field or in vaccination centres anywhere in the country. Data can be captured offline and will sync back-and-forth whenever an internet connection is available. This navigates the patchy connectivity that can confront primary health care workers in delivering services to remote villages in the Pacific and Samoa specifically.

Enhancements and improvements continue to be made in the system responding to evolving circumstances, user experience and feedback. This demonstrates the importance of working closely and directly with governments to ensure the system works for them, and their citizens. For example, patient identification was improved in Samoa after health workers fed back that there were challenges in searching for patients that were already in the system due to inconsistencies in family surnames and father’s surnames, a traditional form of identification.

With the success of the Tamanu Immunisation Module roll-out, planning is already underway to scale up use of Tamanu to include NCD screening in Samoa.

“Tupaia and Tamanu have been critical tools in our fight against COVID-19 – we are grateful to DFAT for all their support. Fa’afetai!”

Lenara Tupa’i-Fui, A.CEO

Health Information Technology & Communications

Samoa Ministry of Health

Treating a broken arm does not generally require an extensive knowledge of the patient’s medical history. But when it comes to non-communicable diseases (NCDs) such as cardiovascular disease, chronic respiratory disease and diabetes, that knowledge is crucial.

NCDs are the leading cause of death in Pacific Island countries, accounting for between 60 and 80% of mortalities. In countries such as Fiji and Samoa, diabetes is the leading cause of disability. Lower limb amputation for diabetic gangrene is the most common surgical operation in Fiji, a stat that could be reduced by earlier detection and more consistent treatment plans.

A consistent treatment plan improves outcomes for NCDs such as diabetes

In simple terms, to manage diabetes you need to keep a person’s blood sugar low over the long term. That’s hard to achieve even in the most well-resourced settings, but what really sets it back is arbitrary changes to a person’s eating plan or drug regimen.

In order to know whether a new treatment is working, you need to know whether their fasting blood sugar is improving or getting worse. If you don’t have a person’s medical history, and they return a high blood sugar reading, you might be inclined to think a drastically new treatment is required. But if you had a record of previous tests, and know that their blood sugar is actually improving, then you’d keep the drug the same and maybe make small tweaks to the dosage.

On the other hand, a mildly high reading could be a real concern if that person has never had elevated blood sugar reading before. You would want to monitor the situation closely. If you didn’t know their medical history, you might miss the early warning signs.

Paper-based record systems are an obstacle to proactive healthcare interventions

Paper-based record systems are almost always tied to a single location. If a person’s only interaction with the healthcare system is with a single clinic, that might not cause any issues. That situation, however, would not be likely or desirable. Paper-based records can be put into the hands of patients, of course, but these are too easily lost or damaged and patients may not have access to these paper records when they are at their most vulnerable (such as when they’re going through an emergency medical situation).

Health care in the Pacific Islands – like in many settings – is typically reactive: a person has a specific concern about their health, so they visit a health facility and are treated for that concern. This is a big problem when it comes to NCDs, because these isolated visits can be siloed from each other and knowledge about the patient doesn’t build up – it’s often not until very late in a disease’s progression that you notice its insidious effects.

These are problems we’re trying to solve. We’re currently rolling out an NCD screening tool as part of our electronic medical record (EMR) software project, Tamanu. The aim is for nurses to go out into the community, into schools, identify people who may be at risk, and develop action plans for people to follow. From there, people at risk might follow up at their local clinic, a hospital, or a diabetes centre, for further diagnosis and treatment.

Using a paper-based system, this kind of proactive community outreach would be incredibly challenging. By using Tamanu, every professional in the person’s continuum of care will be able to access their treatment plan and update it, making sure that treatment is consistent, comprehensive and coordinated. Tamanu is also a sync-enabled system, allowing health workers to enter data (on mobile or desktop) when offline, allowing them to access patients in even the most remote settings.

Electronic medical records create more trust in the healthcare system and more willingness to engage with it

Anyone who’s ever interacted with a healthcare system in any country knows the frustration of filling out forms and giving a detailed and personal medical history, only to be referred onto another facility and asked to go through it all again. Intimate discussions of your health conditions and body can make you feel vulnerable, and it’s difficult to put yourself through it time and time again.

Beyond the sheer hassle of it, it feels like no one’s paying attention to you or putting in the effort to remember you. It starts to feel pointless and that experience is no different for people in the Pacific Islands.

If we want people to engage with the healthcare system, we have to make the experience positive for people. Electronic medical records are one way to do that. They reduce the friction and they make people feel seen, because each new healthcare professional they interact with is already familiar with their history.

Improvements to basic processes don’t attract headlines the way new drugs do, but they make a huge difference to the healthcare system and to people’s lives.

“Electronic medical records improve quality of care, patient outcomes, and safety through improved management, reduction in medication errors, reduction in unnecessary investigations, and improved communication and interactions among primary care providers, patients, and other providers involved in care.”
– Donna P. Manca MD MCLSC FCFP, Do electronic medical records improve quality of care?

This project is proudly supported by the Australian Government.

This is why Beyond Essential Systems, in collaboration with the mSupply Foundation, is very proud to announce that we have partnered with the Government of Samoa to help address health supply chain issues across the country. We will be working to improve access to essential medicines and medical supplies and are particularly enthusiastic about connecting with individuals across Samoan society, from health workers and decision makers to patients and community leaders. In doing so, we look forward to creating real, lasting impact across the entire health sector.

We will approach this project by combining our collaborative, country-focused approach, developed through years of experience in the Pacific, with cutting edge digital tools including mSupply and Tupaia. Our overall goal is to improve the end-to-end supply of medicines by implementing a reliable, efficient Pharmaceutical Logistics Management Information System and providing the necessary support to optimise its use.

By improving supply chain systems, we will support better health outcomes, from tertiary hospitals to smaller health facilities in the community. We will digitise supply chains across every health facility, to help workers improve their purchasing, storage and distribution processes and to streamline dispensing to help ensure patient safety.

At the Ministry of Health level, this will translate to real-time visibility of all commodities in the country, helping drive evidence-based decision making, reducing waste and improving the quality use of medicines.

As a key component in achieving this, we will be using mSupply, the leading medical supply chain management software for low resource settings around the world. Our experienced developers will adapt it to address Samoa’s specific needs, continuously collaborating with locals to ensure it works for them. It will also be integrated with Tupaia, a health data aggregation, analysis and visualisation platform designed specifically for the Pacific that will enable commodity data to be overlaid with information on service availability and readiness, infrastructure, utilisation and capability.

We look forward to being able to use our extensive experience, cutting edge technology, research skills, training tools and – most of all – growing our close relationship with local staff to support the people on the ground and help drive meaningful change.

With initial funding from the New Zealand Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade (MFAT), the project aims to improve access to essential medicines and will support long-term health system development in the wider Indo-Pacific region. MFAT’s funding will support initial implementation in 6 Polynesian countries – Cook Islands, Niue, Samoa, Tokelau, Tonga and Tuvalu – until 2025. We will spend the coming weeks and months forming an advisory panel made of representatives from each of these countries and signing MOUs with each. Other countries are invited to formally join and utilise DTAC’s support, whilst the resources we develop will be released for free use across the entire region.

Working in close collaboration with local staff, DTAC will support partner countries in setting, meeting and surpassing minimum regional standards in essential medicines access, health supply chains and associated digital health systems.

All in-country services provided by DTAC will be provided free, including deployments of mSupply and Tupaia, training sessions, procurement and warehousing reviews, annual quantification assistance, and support for basic auditing and research. DTAC will also provide support, system integrations or maintenance where requested to other digital systems, with particular experience in supporting and implementing DHIS2.

Importantly, the Centre has been designed with a strong focus on capacity-building, aiming to build a peer-to-peer network of local mSupply experts and skilled staff capable of maintaining health supply chains across the region. We envision a future in which technical capacity needs can be met by south-south collaboration between partner countries – this is a model we have demonstrated as recently as last year, when Agusto dos Santos (Timor-Leste) led the roll-out of mSupply Mobile in Solomon Islands (link).

DTAC will additionally aim to foster closer collaboration between countries on medicines quality assurance, identification and prequalification of suppliers, sharing of price information, clinical pharmacy training tools, research and IT capacity. This will be supported through the further development of mSupply’s ‘Health Supply Hub’. The Health Supply Hub expands on mSupply’s existing tender module and will allow countries to post tenders, receive bids and manage quality assurance documentation. Suppliers will be able to post price catalogues and availability data for emergency supplies, maintain a single repository of quality assurance documentation and submit bids in a standardised format amongst all participating countries.

In addition to individual country support, the DTAC is also developing broader global initiatives including a 7-level accreditation system recognising the skills of international mSupply users and providing a structured learning system for mastering mSupply, which is now used in more than 30 countries worldwide. We expect to launch the mSupply accreditation system in 2020.

We see DTAC as an important long-term facility supporting access to essential medicines in the Indo-Pacific region and hope to see its services expanded to more countries in the near future.

For more information, please contact:

Emily Porrello (emily@bes.au)

Michael Nunan (michael@bes.au)

Craig Drown (craig@msupply.foundation)

The response in the Pacific however has been exceptional. Most Pacific Island Countries moved swiftly to shut-down international travel and in countries such as Fiji, which experienced early cases, the initial response of authorities seems – for now – to have been highly effective in preventing widespread community transmission. Elsewhere, in countries such as Tonga, Samoa, Kiribati, Solomon Islands and Vanuatu, whilst no cases have been detected, the spectre of COVID-19 looms large and preparedness work has been continuing apace. Most countries now have the capacity to undertake laboratory testing for COVD-19 locally – this has been achieved especially with the support of Australia and New Zealand, alongside other donors.

Tupaia is supporting health decision making related to COVID-19 in a number of Pacific Island Countries and elsewhere. Our staff, like everyone else, have been frustrated at our inability to travel and support face-to-face like we would usually be doing but we are providing as much remote support as we possibly can and we’ll be back travelling as soon as it is appropriate to do so.

Whilst very busy, our thoughts are also with everyone affected by the current situation, whether people have lost their livelihoods, their loved ones or their own health.

Data visualisations

As a data aggregation and visualisation platform, with the support of DFAT, we have been able to support countries to prepare for the potential onset of a COVID-19 outbreak.  In a demonstration of the data display possibilities, we have also developed a new module in Tupaia to show visualisations of the data related to the COVID-19 outbreak in Australia – these include data on confirmed cases, testing and deaths at the national and state levels.

We are also working with flutracking.net to visualise their crowd-sourced, weekly syndromic surveillance data at the postcode, LGA and state levels – this year, flutracking is also collecting data relating to COVID-19, which may help health authorities spot localised outbreaks more quickly than laboratory testing.

Australian COVID-19 data displays in Tupaia

Tonga

After seeing the data displays implemented in Tupaia for Australia, Tonga requested support to use Tupaia for COVID-19 related data collection and visualisations as part of their readiness planning and response activities. A facility assessment tool was developed and loaded into Tupaia MediTrak allowing Tonga to rapidly implement assessment of all facilities in Tongatapu for COVID-19 readiness. This enabled a quick stocktake of the commodities that would be of use to the facilities in the event that they were faced with COVID-19 cases (e.g. soap, alcohol hand sanitizer, face masks). This allowed facilities that had items out of stock to be prioritised for re-supply and/or allocation of additional essential resources. A picture of the Island group’s capacity for ICU admission and isolation admissions could also be mapped by asking facilities how many of each type of bed they have. Plans are currently underway to roll-out the Tupaia facility readiness assessments in the outer islands.

The results are displayed in Tupaia dashboards and map overlays, allowing the Ministry of Health easy access to the data, helping inform decision making around COVID-19 preparedness.

Tonga COVID-19 data displays in Tupaia

Samoa

Samoa have also been working with us on their COVID-19 preparedness needs, developing their own data collection tools for use in Tupaia MediTrak. They have developed surveys to conduct facility assessments, household assessments, clinical surveillance and contact tracing with respect to COVID-19 readiness. We are continuing to work with them to meet their requests for data visualisation support during this time.

Tupaia’s contact tracing tool is a basic mechanism allowing health authorities to create Index Cases and survey unlimited ‘Contact Cases’, linking each back to the original index case. It was designed specifically for the Pacific context and works across all notifiable diseases – we have made adaptations to meet the COVID-19 tracing needs in Samoa and Tonga (though neither have recorded confirmed cases yet).

Laos schools

We have been engaged in Laos to present aggregated data relating to their education system, as part of their role as the education cluster lead – this work allows data capture and visualisation across over 14,000 schools. This work pulls data from multiple education data sources to assist with decision making around the availability of clean water and infection control commodities, quarantine sites and which schools are open and closed during the pandemic.

Sample data visualisations from Laos education sector

General

A suite of surveys have been added to Tupaia MediTrak, which can be used by any country requesting access. If a country would like to proceed with data collection, we can build map overlays and dashboards specifically designed to display the information collected.

• Facility assessments and Facility Management System (including both data collection on-site and data aggregation from existing databases)
• Suspected COVID-19 cases
  • Allows countries to document and display the number of suspected cases, to monitor the likely source of cases (e.g. overseas travel), track location of infected patients.
  • It became necessary to include robust monitoring around suspected cases as countries closed borders it became difficult for them to outsource laboratory support due to a lack of flights to transport samples.
• Confirmed COVID-19 cases, including automated epi-curves.
• National Health System Readiness Assessment
  • A high-level assessment of the health system’s capacity to test for and respond to a local COVID-19 outbreak.

Pacific Syndromic Surveillance System

With the support of the Indo-Pacific Centre for Health Security and the WHO sub-regional office for the Pacific, we are re-building the Pacific Syndromic Surveillance System to optimise it for the Pacific context. This will allow participating countries to automatically sync national-level surveillance data to the platform and for real-time visualisation of data down to the primary healthcare facility or village level. We are also building tools to allow countries to more easily digitize data collection down at the facility level and enabling data to be more easily routed into national health data warehouses.

Supply Chain Support

With international travel heavily reduced and the shutdown of many manufacturing industries across the world we are also implementing ways to support Pacific Island Countries in anticipation of delays to stock arriving.

Preparing stock for pandemic response is a difficult task, as the tools used for quantification during normal times become inadequate. We have developed a calculator that countries can use to assist in predicting the amount of personal protective equipment (PPE), infection prevention and control (IPC) products, and diagnostics consumables they would need to meet the needs of their country based on the population and size of the health workforce.

We are supporting NZ and Australia in planning their supply chain responses by liaising with countries on medicines and consumables availability, providing fortnightly updates between countries and donors.

Finally, we are building a regional ‘emergency commodity’ platform in partnership with the mSupply Foundation to track critical commodities across all countries in real-time to help prevent stock-outs.

For any questions about our new capabilities or ability to support COVID-19 programming, please get in touch with us at contact@tupaia.org

Part of this funding will enable the mSupply Foundation (mSupply) and Tupaia Health Resource Mapping to work in partnership to develop a new Regional Health Supply Chain Centre in the Pacific. This resource will be rolled out to support Cook Islands, Niue, Samoa, Tokelau, Tonga and Tuvalu over the next five years.

The new digital health centre will strengthen all aspects of the health supply chain and is intended to increase pharmaceutical management capability, implement and integrate data management software, improve essential medicines lists and streamline procurement, warehousing and distribution systems.

Craig Drown, the Director of the mSupply foundation said, ‘the Regional Health Supply Chain Centre will help to optimise supply management systems and cut supply-chain costs associated with manual stock management reporting processes. Improved procurement and reporting tools and the chance to provide far more training will save health clinics in remote, Pacific countries valuable time and money.’

Initially, mSupply will be implemented (or expanded) in Tuvalu, Niue, Cook Islands to introduce mobile-based reporting and follow-up training and support will follow in countries who are already utilising this technology, with Tonga as a high priority.

Tupaia will play an important role in supporting health clinics and health workers in each country to understand and adopt new digital health reporting tools and systems through linking together existing software systems, providing real-time data visualisations and facilitating training. This will allow clinics to have oversight of what health resources are available across the region – via the Tupaia MediTrak app – and use live supply chain data to help inform decision making, efficiently target training resources, remove barriers to accessing essential medicines, and track medicines usage issues, such as those relating to antimicrobial resistance or opioid misuse.

This project will also see mSupply develop a new open-source Supplier Hub which will allow pharmaceutical suppliers and wholesalers to manage their interactions with countries electronically.

‘The Supplier Hub is a real game changer for health workers who manage medicine logistics. This will be the first full Supply Hub that will allow supplies and countries in Polynesia to coordinate and manage stock requests, tenders, Quality Assurance, traceability and forecasting in one application, in real time’, said Craig.

Previously, much of this reporting has been paper based and it has been impossible for health clinics to know what stock exists, where, and when orders will be received, making it extremely hard to coordinate logistical operations.

The Supply Hub will help solve this problem, by enabling better communication, document sharing and transparency between stockists and suppliers so that deployment of medicines can be tracked and monitored.