In early 2024 the Tonga Pharmacy and Medical Facility (TPMF) warehouse opened in Veitongo, Tongatapu. The warehouse has provided much needed additional suitable storage space for drugs and pharmacy items needed by Tonga’s public health service, hospitals and health centers.

Tonga is a Polynesian country in the southwestern Pacific Ocean consisting of approximately 170 islands, of which 36 are inhabited, with a population of around 107,000 people.The country’s health system includes central hospitals, peripheral health centers and community-based services.Key health challenges facing Tonga include rising rates of non-communicable diseases such as diabetes, obesity, heart disease and cancer, while communicable diseases such as tuberculosis, and vaccine-preventable diseases persist.

Prior to the new warehouse opening, all of the national-level medicines and medical supplies were stored in the Central Pharmacy and Medical Supplies (CPMS) unit office in Nuku’alofa which was converted from Tonga’s original old hospital. This old site was overcrowded, difficult to access, and not a fit-for-purpose national storage facility. The new TPMF warehouse has allowed for storage layout improvements, proper stock management processes and a full, accurate stock take to be completed.

With the support of BES, Warehouse Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs) were developed and adopted in late 2024 and mSupply has been implemented throughout the warehouse. Now, in late 2025, the dedication and hard work by the CPMS staff is generating significant results.

In 2024 weekly cycle-count spot checks were commenced to routinely audit that the stock on hand quantities in storage matched the records in mSupply, the electronic logistics information management system used by CPMS. In 2024 the accuracy rate of the random spot checks was regularly between 20-60%. By late 2025, after implementing annual and quarterly stock takes, the average accuracy rate of random spot check has reached 90%. With dedicated storages spaces for medicines and medical supplies there is more room for logical storage layout planning and easier maneuverability for staff to pick orders and regularly stock take items.

The facility is also safer, and cleaner with stock now stored on proper steel shelving, improving efficiency as well as staff welfare. The use of forklifts and other warehouse aids reduces the risk of physical injury or accident.

Knowing that the stock on hand data is accurate has been essential for determining how much to order in future. mSupply, the electronic logistics information management system used by CPMS, generates suggested order quantity data that is now more accurate and reliable. The increased trust in the stock management data from mSupply has led to improved ordering of medicines and medical supplies and reduced under and over ordering items, further helping to efficiently manage the storage spaces.

At the same time, medical item availability has consistently been above 90% at the central warehouses and in fact has averaged close to 95% throughout 2025, based on an indicator item list which has been set for measurement.

BES have been supporting Tonga since 2018

Fehi Tu’iha’angana, a Pharmacist at CPMS, says the new warehouse SOPs that detail processes for purchase order management, goods receiving, managing expires, monthly reporting and other processes …“are really useful for having specific written processes to go back to refer to and follow. The flow diagrams are particularly helpful.”

The CPMS Stock Control Coordinator, Sesi Lea’aetoa, acknowledges the new warehouse SOPs have also helped define staff specific duties and roles: “It helps us with teamwork and directs co-workers to have a hand in doing all the work,” she says.

Beyond Essential Systems (BES) and The mSupply Foundation (TMF) under the DTAC initiative supported by the New Zealand Ministry of Health Polynesian Health Corridors program have supported Tonga’s CPMS unit every step of the way to achieve these outcomes. For example, BES have provided training on operationalizing the warehouse SOPs and TMF have helped create tailored data reporting dashboards that allow the easy tracking of key supply chain performance indicators.

BES and TMF are pleased that the New Zealand Ministry of Health Polynesian Health Corridors program has extended funding to continue to provide tailored support to Tonga until June 2027.

The achievements of Tonga’s CPMS unit in warehousing and stock management for drugs and medical supplies illustrate that tailored supply chain support combined with dedicated staff can create tangible differences and significant improvements over time, saving money, improving medicines availability and using data to inform decision making. These differences need multi-facted support however, combining digital tools, physical storage infrastructure, policy & processes, and – most importantly – highly engaged and effective staff. In Tonga, we are lucky to be working now with all four!

Solomon Islands have reached the halfway point of an ambitious Health Supply Chain reform project that will improve the quality of healthcare and supply of essential medicines for future generations to come. Led by Solomon Islands’ Ministry of Health & Medical Services (MHMS), long-term friends from Australia, BES, were engaged to deliver the reform project funded by the Australian Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade (DFAT).

NRH Pharmacy staff in Solomon Islands with BES consultant Agusto dos Santos

Solomon Islands is a 3-hour flight northeast of Brisbane. Rich in culture, natural beauty, tropical weather, and some of the best reefs and surf breaks in the world, Solomons has six major islands and more than 900 outer islands and atolls. The population of 720,000 is young, dispersed, and multi-lingual, while the majority live in rural areas and maintain subsistence livelihoods in villages of a few hundred people.

Solomon’s health supply chain was considered strong for many years compared to other low-income, low-resource countries in the Pacific. Since 2018 however, successive shocks to the system saw a regression in performance indicators. The impacts of these were felt in frequent stockouts of essential medicines in large hospitals, warehouses, and primary health clinics.

Enter the national Health Supply Chain reform project in April 2023. The 12-month project kicked off with a review and assessment – 34 senior stakeholder meetings in fact, from Government departments within the Ministry of Health and Medical Services (MHMS), the National Medical Store (NMS), and the National Referral Hospital (NRH). No stone was left unturned! More than 150 rapid interventions and upskilling with MHMS staff was planned to re-establish the once resilient national supply chain.

Hang on, what is a health supply chain?

Health supply chains are the behind-the-scenes activities taking place to stock your pharmacy with medicine and supplies for everyone. A strong supply chain involves:

• Getting the right manufacturers and suppliers through a procurement process
• Monitoring stock levels, usage and reordering to prevent stockouts
• Deliveries; in Solomons all medicine supply is centralised through the National Medical Stores (NMS) warehouse, where it’s managed and distributed nationally:
  • NMS distributes directly to the National Referral Hospital (NRH), clinics in Honiara City Council (HCC), Guadalcanal, Russell Islands, and Malaita Outer Islands, as well as every Second-Level Medical Store (SLMS)
  • Second-Level stores then distribute stock within their catchment which generally cover 10-15 health clinics, most of which are located in remote areas.
• Let’s not forget transportation! Trucks, small aircraft, boats, cars, motorbikes and sometimes even by foot! Medicine and supplies reach extremely remote provinces, and often not without complication.

Marianne Tanavalu, the National Medical Supplies Procurement Manager explains that one of the good things the reform project is doing is improving timeliness and quality control in health supply procurement evaluations.

“We have standardised manufacturer names, we introduced minimum delivery periods for all items and set mandatory expiry information from all bidders to make evaluation clearer. This helps avoid uncertainty when we compare and order medical supplies. And it can reduce waste and avoid stock-outs of medicine,” said Marianne.

Photo: Marianne Tanavalu, National Medical Supplies, Procurement Manager.

Having reached the halfway point of the project, the end of the tunnel is growing brighter. In the last 6-months, health supply chain staff in Solomon Islands have shown their appetite for change and improvement, delivering several big ticket projects already, with the support of a small team of BES project staff.

#1 – Digitising procurement

In September 2023, digital procurement software ‘the Health Supply Hub’ was launched. The Hub improves bidding processes for suppliers, increases transparency and continues to help lower the cost of medicine procurement.

Solomon Islands were the second country in the world to implement the electronic Logistics Management Information System (eLMIS) mSupply, which is now used in more than 35 countries. In 2013, Solomon Islands then became the first country to use Version 1 of mSupply Mobile! So it’s no surprise Solomons continues to be at the cutting edge of supply chain innovation. But a system is only as good as the people who use it, which leads us to the next big reform.

#2 – A plan for people and processes

The Health Supply Hub came out alongside an Annual Procurement Plan focusing on the people side of procurement. The plan coordinates processes delivered by people in multiple workplaces and locations. Through its delivery, the plan has created better clarity of roles and greater collaboration between the Ministry of Health and Medical Services and the National Medical Store teams.

#3 – Upskilling through workshops and training sessions

A priority of the project was to give everyone involved in the health supply chain a chance to upskill and learn more about specialist topics. Dozens of training sessions and workshops have already been held on procurement and health supply chain management, with many more scheduled in Honiara and the provinces. Sharing ideas and experiences between workplaces – such as learning how the digital procurement systems work – have led to requests for broader, country-wide exposure to digital procurement systems that could further improve tender approval times.

Photo: BES consultant Agusto Dos Santos runs mSupply training at the National Referral Hospital in Honiara

Workshops have also provided a space for more collaboration, where priority issues can be addressed in person; such as supporting updates to the essential medicines lists, stock distribution or revising policies and plans.

Chief Pharmacist, Solomon Bosa, thanked BES staff at the end of the National Referral Hospital training session.

“The hospital pharmacists from the Pharmacy Division have not received such comprehensive training on mSupply before. The need for data input to the supply chain systems was also useful to pharmacists working to avoid stock-outs and expiry.” said Solomon.

A long friendship

The Health Supply Chain reform project is backed by a long-held friendship between Solomon Islands and Australia. The company BES, who were engaged by MHMS and DFAT to deliver the reform project, was founded by a group of Australian pharmacists and public health experts who once called Solomon Islands home as volunteers, employees, and technical assistants. Some of the BES delivery team include former Solomons residents:

Director Michael Nunan (formerly the Chief pharmacist with the MHMS Public Pharmacy Services, and the primary healthcare pharmacy support specialist for the MHMS National Pharmacy Services, Honiara), who worked in Solomon Islands for 5 years.
Director Erin Mitchell (National training pharmacist with MHMS, pharmacovigilance pharmacist for the Solomon Islands Malaria program, and health resource officer with WHO, Honiara), who worked in Solomon Islands for 4 years.
Head of Programs Emily Porrello (Rational use of medicines pharmacist, MHMS, Honiara), who worked in Solomon Islands for 1 year.

It’s safe to say all three consider Solomon Islands a home away from home.

“It is such a pleasure to be supporting Solomon Islands again – a large piece of my heart is always there, along with many old friends and we look forward to seeing this project improve healthcare for them and all patients,” said Michael.

With five months of the Health Supply Chain reform project remaining, the foundations for reliable flows of medicines and medical supplies to healthcare facilities are being laid. Our shared aim is to see new knowledge and practices embedded for years to come, and measures such as healthcare accessibility, efficiency, and decreased stock outages increasingly seen as the norm.

Sam Samba, Mathew Miria, and Yu Par Min Lwin achieved the three highest scores out of 500 participants from around the world last year, showing their outstanding dedication to the course and deep engagement with the materials. We spoke to them about the projects they’re involved with and the importance of the course for their work.

Yu Par Min Lwin

Yu Par Min Lwin  is a Senior Logistics Management Information System (LMIS) Officer for the Chemonics International GHSC-PSM Project, providing technical support for mSupply users throughout Myanmar including their National AIDS, TB, and Malaria Programs.

Mathew Miria

Mathew Miria works with World Vision PNG as the Eastern Highlands & New Guinea Islands Regional Coordinator for TB/HIV Supplies.

MSupply is the main system Mathew and his team use to manage shipments of TB/HIV medical commodities. Some of the tasks they perform through mSupply include making stock and inventory adjustments, creating pick-slips, confirming invoices, attending to requisition orders, running stocktakes, and providing reports. It is used on a daily basis.

“The course helped me to understand and appreciate the overall importance of using the system. It captures everything and provides the ‘Information/Reporting’ needed with regards to TB/HIV supplies.”

Sam Samba

Our very top score came from Sam Samba, a Senior Analyst for the Clinton Health Access Initiative. 

Sam has been using mSupply as a LMIS Officer and National Administrator for mSupply in Sierra Leone. He supported implementation of mSupply at their medical warehouses, and is responsible for the creation of accounts, amongst many other tasks.

“The course is extremely impactful, as I have gained more knowledge about mSupply and am hoping to learn more.”

BES supports health supply chains across the Pacific, helping to implement systems to improve access to medicines across all levels of each health system. The champions of those supply chains, though, are our local counterparts who work hard every day in warehouses, trucks, offices, and pharmacies to improve the lives of others. Upskilling and empowering these local counterparts brings context and sustainability that we could never hope to achieve on our own. A new initiative we are supporting are the DTAC Scholarships, awarded to Pacific Islanders based on annual applications by anyone working in a public health supply chain.

Last week we caught up with Bettina Ereinao (Honiara, Solomon Islands), one of the star recipients of the two 2021 DTAC Scholarships. Bettina has gone from strength to strength since joining the Solomon Islands Ministry of Health over 10 years ago, and we’re so proud to share a little about her recent experience.

Firstly, a little background on the project: in 2020, BES partnered with the mSupply Foundation to run the supply chain Data and Technical Assistance Centre (DTAC) across six Pacific Island Countries and Territories, with a goal to improve health outcomes in Polynesia by increasing access to quality essential medicines and strengthening supply chain systems. Funded by New Zealand’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade, DTAC aims to support member countries in setting, meeting and surpassing minimum regional standards in essential medicines access, health supply chains and digital health systems.

Last year, we announced that DTAC would support two emerging professionals in the Pacific region to undertake a health supply chain course provided by the Empower School of Health. The scholarship enabled successful applicants to complete a short course of their choice, with the opportunity to expand their knowledge in topics such as procurement, inventory management, rational use of medicines, and international career development.

After receiving one of the scholarships, Bettina selected the Certificate in PSM (procurement and supply chain management) Support Functions and Systems, which she completed in June this year.

The certificate is self-paced and entirely online, broken down into seven chapters of pre-recorded lectures and a final assessment. Students are introduced to critical functions of procurement and supply chain management, as well as learning practical approaches to pharmaceutical quality assurance, and the financial impact of PSM.

Completing this course is a real testament to Bettina’s self-discipline and drive: many of us know how learning in a virtual classroom is a challenge in itself, but Bettina was also tuning in from a remote location in the midst of a national COVID19 outbreak, and came down with the virus herself during her studies.

Since receiving the certificate, Bettina has already stepped up to a Customer Service Pharmacy Officer position at the National Medical Stores Hospital in Honiara, a vital role in the delivery of medical supplies throughout the country. “The course was timely for me,” Bettina says, “as I’ve gained more knowledge about supply chain and procurement, which will help me a lot in my work. My interest in supply chain management in medical supplies has grown.”

We extend our huge congratulations to Bettina on her amazing achievements this year, and wish her success in her new role at NMS. Watch out for Bettina’s webinar and blog post for DTAC as she shares her knowledge with colleagues across the region.

Fiji Pharmaceutical & Biomedical Services Centre is the centre warehouse in Fiji. FPBS is responsible for managing all of Fiji’s health supplies from medicines to x-rays, and distributes those to more than 220 health facilities across the country.

In this video, Alexandro Naisara from the FPBS Stock Verification & Process Control Unit discusses how mSupply is making inventory management faster and easier than ever.

mSupply is the world’s leading Logistics Management Information System (LMIS) for health supply chains in low-resource settings. Beyond Essential is a close partner with the mSupply Foundation and specialises in the implementation of mSupply, leading its implementation across settings in the Pacific, Asia and Africa.

To learn more, visit our mSupply page here.

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.

We have three main aims for this project:

• Improve the availability of medicines at the primary healthcare level
• Lower medicine costs nationwide
• Achieve more equitable access to medicine for all citizens

Ensuring the Right Medicines of the Right Quality and at the Right Price are available at the Right Time, in the Right Place in the Right Quantities.

That’s a lot of separate pieces to get right! This is why we started by evaluating how those pieces look in the current Fijian Health Supply Chain. We have already completed an extensive health supply chain review on the ground, which involved:

• > 30 meetings  held  with  senior  internal  and external stakeholders
• 230 documents and template forms reviewed
• 7 facilities visited
• 3 consultative presentations  with  the  MHMS Executive

What we found was that while there are some definite strengths in the current system, there are several issues that  can be addressed.  These include strengthening the data informing supply so that  the stock issued to medical facilities better meets their actual demand. We also want to streamline and digitize the procurement process and improve workflows in the main warehouse.

The strengthening work will include, implementing two key digital platforms. The first is mSupply. It is a proven, effective, scalable Electronic Logistics Management System (eLMIS), which we will use to improve the supply chain management of essential medicines. It will be integrated with the second digital platform, our own Tupaia, which will be used to map the national health system and provide an accessible, intuitive visualisation of commodities across all facilities in near-real time. Tupaia will additionally support disaster response, cold chain management, and quality use of medicine interventions. We are confident that with this targeted approach and combination of digital systems, we can help to significantly improve access to essential health supplies across Fiji.

Most importantly, our partners at the MHMS and Fiji Pharmaceutical and Biomedical Services (FPBS) are as excited as we are about getting started and have committed the resources required to action change. Our role, above all, is simply to support them as best we can.

For the duration of this project, our key staff Michael Nunan (Project Executive), Emily Porrello (Delivery Lead) and Dhanya Herath (Software Lead), along with the rest of the BES team and the mSupply Foundation, look forward to working directly alongside stakeholders from MHMS, FPBS and across the Fijian government. We are excited to understand and design systems that deliver real impact.

If you’re interested in learning more about the project, or want to check out some of Tupaia’s features for yourself, log into www.tupaia.org and explore the data.

This project is proudly supported by the Australian Government.

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.

This is the very real challenge faced by many health supply chain managers – usually pharmacists – across low-income countries in the region. Data is often incomplete or out of date, many facilities write their orders – by hand – once a month and have no avenue to provide feedback about what has arrived, what is working and what is not. Your job – and thousands of lives – hinge on the availability and condition of those medicines but you have no idea whether the clinic fridge is working, whether they’re using the medicines correctly or whether each clinic is even open.

Add to this the stress of trying to improve RUM across a diverse workforce, responding to disease outbreaks or preparing for the increasingly frequent disasters that beset their populations.

It is little wonder then that globally, medicines availability at the primary healthcare level remains extremely low. A 2014 study showed that primary healthcare centres in developing countries had on average just 40% of the essential medicines they need. First and foremost, this impacts patients and often means private clinics, NGO’s and other health providers shoulder the increased strain to maintain health services. It also impacts on donor and government funding and poor health outcomes impact disproportionately on other sectors, such as education and the labour force.

A new project called Tupaia is aiming to address these problems in the Asia Pacific region.

Tupaia is an important figure in Pacific history. He was a Polynesian who joined Captain Cook’s first mission through the Pacific as a navigator and translator in 1769. He was able to map the Pacific better than could be done with modern instruments of the time, by using the stars, the tides, birdlife, wind patterns and his own intuition. Tupaia died in Java in 1770 from what would now be considered a preventable illness (history records it as malaria or dysentery).

Too many Pacific Islanders still die unnecessarily today and that is a problem we are trying to fix.

Tupaia, which is supported by the Australian Government through DFAT’s innovationXchange, is a six-country project that aims to improve data availability and analysis for healthcare supply chain systems.

In simple terms, we’re helping governments NGO’s and donors see the bigger picture of health resources in each country. Where are clinics functioning well, with well trained staff and well supported communities and where are precious resources being wasted as, for example, medicines expire on the shelf unused or damaged equipment sits without repair.

At the heart of this project is www.tupaia.org. An interactive map that clearly presents relevant, up to date, customisable information to pharmacy staff, other health planners, donors and the public.

The Director of Pharmacy can easily identify which facilities have low availability of medicines and can target their resources more specifically to address these problems, the Minister for Health can look country-wide and see the average availability of medicines across all facilities to see whether particular policies are working. On a regional level, health planners can also see where too many antibiotics are being used, where vaccine stock-outs are widespread or where medicines usage appears to be out of the ordinary.

The Tupaia project is supported by several elements:

• The open-source release of an app called mSupply Mobile – a tablet-based electronic inventory system designed for use in clinics and health centres
• The free release of a health data collection app called Tupaia MediTrak. This allows any country to use the Tupaia model to collect and compare in country health data.
• The development of an integrated, multi-country database for better regional health planning
• The launch of an online data portal for that database at tupaia.org

So how does it work?

A program called mSupply, which is a desktop-based stock management software developed for healthcare systems in developing countries, has been used widely across the Pacific for many years. mSupply can handle procurement, warehousing, quantification and distribution of supplies – but once those supplies leave the warehouse, it was difficult to tell whether they were being used appropriately or which facilities had sufficient stocks.

In 2013, Solomon Islands piloted a mobile version of mSupply. The results of this pilot project were very encouraging and when a new version of the software was released in Timor-Leste in 2016, DFAT (through their new innovationXchange) agreed to fund the open-source release of the software, so its benefits could be replicated across the region.

With the prospect of good quality data coming in from several countries in the region, we showed that it could be more effective if it was brought together in a single place. After all, the software being used was the same in each country, it just required someone to combine the databases and build out a platform for people to access the information.

Just as Tupaia was able to bring together his vast knowledge of the tides and flows of the Pacific to guide Captain Cook, his namesake project will bring together a vast resource of health data to guide health policy and the distribution of resources.

In addition to collating the mSupply databases in each country (including both mSupply Desktop and mSupply Mobile), to track pharmaceutical supply chain management, the integrated database uses a health data collection app called Tupaia MediTrak to map every health facility in participating countries. The app collects data on hundreds of indicators, such as whether or not the facility has running water, what electricity source they rely on or whether they have sufficient staff housing. Via the website, this information can be quickly and easily disseminated in customisable dashboards to different user groups.

Already, in Timor-Leste, a version of Tupaia has been credited with helping to improve the availability of nutritional commodities and other medicines in facilities there. With the support of World Food Program, we started rolling out mSupply Mobile in facilities in Timor in 2016. By the end of 2017, we will have installed mSupply Mobile in 100 clinics and health centres, as well as mapping nearly 300 facilities with Tupaia MediTrak.

Since the middle of 2016, medicines availability has already increased by 20% in the country, whilst prices have reduced. We are able to track these changes on Tupaia and use that data to advocate for the continuation of pharmacy reforms in Timor-Leste.

Timor is also an example of being able to partner with a specific agency to address their specific needs. The World Food Program there uses the dashboards to track nutritional supplements at the facility level. When a facility is showing they have a stock out, WFP field officers immediately get in contact or travel to the facility to address the problem, rather than having to wait for periodic reports, or commit unnecessary time and expenses to visiting every site.

Timor is just one example of what we hope to achieve across many countries in the region. It’s simple really, access to more reliable, timely data helps all actors, from the Head of Pharmacy right down to the patients, make better decisions for themselves, their communities and improve the health outcomes across the region.

– You can explore information from Solomon Islands, Tonga and Kiribati already loaded onto our innovative map at www.tupaia.org – or stay in touch with the project and our mapping teams visiting clinics across far flung regions of Asia Pacific via Facebook (@tupaia.org) or Twitter (@tupaiahealth)