A paper sheet records who arrived. It cannot tell a patient their place in line or the likely wait, and it is slow to turn into figures for TTM or the Ministry.

Staff answer the same question about the wait all day

Families at home have no way to check the queue

No estimate of the wait

A patient cannot tell whether the wait is twenty minutes or three hours.

Relatives stay in the waiting room

They stay close so they do not miss the call, which adds to the crowding.

Walkouts are hard to count

A patient who leaves before seeing a doctor leaves no clear trace on a sheet.

Waits by stage are hard to measure

Time to triage and time to the doctor, by hour and day, need manual counting from paper.

A web application that runs in a browser. Each group has its own screen, and all of them show the same live queue.

Registration desk

Enters each patient as walk-in or ambulance. The system gives the day's next ticket number.

Triage nurses

Call the next patient with Start Triage and pass them to the doctor queue with End Triage.

Doctors

See who is ready after triage and how long they have waited. Start the consultation and mark the visit complete.

ER administrators

Invite staff by email, set each person's role, and run the WhatsApp desk.

Patients and families

See ticket numbers and estimated waits on the waiting-room TV, the public web page and WhatsApp.

Ministry of Health

Receives the ER Reports figures from the ER lead. There is no read-only Ministry role; direct access needs a staff account.

01

Add Patient: arrival

Walk-in or ambulance, then the patient's details. A locked daily counter gives the ticket; the sign-in sheet time can be kept.

02

Start Triage: the wait for triage ends

The TV shows the ticket and name for ten seconds. A patient on WhatsApp gets a message.

03

End Triage: the doctor queue starts

The patient joins the doctor queue. Ambulance and priority-raised patients are listed first.

04

Start Consultation: the wait ends

Stores the wait for the doctor and the total from sign-in to doctor. Complete Visit closes the record.

05

Remove from list: abandoned

Staff mark a patient who leaves as abandoned. The same button removes entries made in error.

Add Patient

The phone field defaults to 684, the American Samoa code; +685 is a small code change. The gender labels go to native-speaker review.

ER Waiting Room Dashboard

Today's figures in Apia time, updated live. Sample data; figures are illustrative.

Today's counts

Total waiting, waiting for triage and for the doctor, patients taken in, consultations completed and abandoned visits.

Raise a patient's priority

Any staff member can give a patient a priority number. Higher numbers go to the top of the triage and doctor queues.

Correct or remove

The same window corrects a patient's details, or removes them after staff type 'remove' to confirm.

TV link

One click copies the link for the waiting-room TV.

Triage queue

Each card shows ticket, name, age, arrival time and walk-in or ambulance. Start Triage calls the patient; End Triage moves them to the doctor queue.

Doctor queue

Who is ready after triage and who is with a doctor. Total wait runs from sign-in to the start of the consultation. Complete Visit closes the record.

Sample data; figures are illustrative.

Waiting-room TV

Total waiting, the estimated wait, and each ticket's stage. Sample data; figures are illustrative.

TV in the waiting room

Every ticket's stage and estimated wait. A patient being called shows by ticket and name for ten seconds.

Any phone, no sign-in

Families nearby or at home open the same queue in a browser. A notice shows when the estimated wait has gone up.

Personal details stay off

Date of birth, age, gender, phone and village never reach the public screens.

Names and priority in the public feed

The public data carries the name, arrival type, priority number and timings of everyone waiting. We can remove names and priority.

01

Register early, if they choose

Name, date of birth, gender, village and reason, sent before arriving. No ticket yet.

02

Checked in at the desk

The desk checks in the WhatsApp registration, or enters the patient as usual. Only then is a ticket issued.

03

Ask for their place in line

The bot gives the stage and how many are ahead. It finds the patient by the phone number given at the desk, never by ticket.

04

Told when it is their turn

A message when triage calls them, and another when the doctor starts. Only people who have written to the TTM number get these.

05

Stop updates at any time

Sending 'stop updates' ends the messages; 'resume' turns them back on.

The WhatsApp menu

Shown in the admin simulator; no number is connected yet. Sample data.

ER Reports: last 30 days

Headline figures, then average waits to triage and to the doctor by day, with the time 90% were seen within. Sample data; figures are illustrative.

7, 30 or 42 days

Whole days only, ending yesterday, in Apia time. A comparison with the previous period appears once enough history exists.

Two waits, kept apart

Arrival to triage, and end of triage to the doctor. This shows which stage is holding patients up.

Left unseen

The share of finished visits marked abandoned. Today this also counts patients removed during or after triage, or in error.

Ambulance arrivals

Counts ambulance arrivals together with walk-ins whose priority was raised on the dashboard.

Midnight to midday

Average arrivals per hour, by day of the week. Darker cells are busier hours.

Midday to midnight

In this sample the busiest hour is Monday at 20:00, with 8.2 arrivals on average.

Six weeks of generated sample history. Sample data; figures are illustrative.

Full records go only to signed-in staff. Public screens get ticket, stage, times, arrival type, priority and name; no birth date, age, gender, phone or village.

Passwords stored as bcrypt hashes

Sign-out after 8 hours, or 30 minutes idle

Only administrators manage staff accounts

Staff account edits logged with IP address

WhatsApp messages must carry Meta's signature

Names and priority in the public feed

The public data carries the name and priority number of everyone waiting. We can remove both if TTM prefers.

Notice and consent

A waiting-room notice that the TV may show names. WhatsApp updates go only to people who wrote in first.

Patient downloads

Any staff member can download patient lists with age, gender, phone and village. We can limit this to administrators.

Who did what

The system does not record which staff member registered, triaged, saw or removed a patient.

Data passing through overseas services

Pusher carries live updates, including full records on the staff channel. Meta carries WhatsApp messages.

01

Weeks 1-2

Set up and train

Change the village list and +685 in the code

Install on the agreed server with backups; set up Pusher and email

Create accounts, train each role, name a super-user per shift

Agree when staff remove a patient, including entries made in error

02

Weeks 3-4

Go live at the desk and on the TV

Every ER patient registered in TimeTrak

TV in the waiting room and public page live

Paper sign-in sheet kept as the fallback

03

Weeks 5-8

Add WhatsApp

Connect TTM's WhatsApp Business number

Meta approves the 'your turn' template

Samoan wording and Upolu and Savai'i village groups, after review

If Meta approval slips, the pilot goes on without WhatsApp

04

Week 8

Review with the Ministry

First 30-day report from real data

Compare with the targets and baseline agreed in weeks 1-2

Decide whether to continue, change or stop

What we ask

A named ER lead and a Ministry counterpart · Agreement on hosting · The village list · A WhatsApp Business number · Native-speaker review · Desktops at the desk, triage and doctor stations, a TV with a browser and a steady internet link; TTM tells us what it already has