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During COVID-19, health workers and community health agents needed to quickly find a facility with a free bed, test or ventilator, and refer the patient in a traceable way. Hospitals, clinics and pharmacies barely communicate, so people turned away in one place are sent from door to door. The idea started in 2020, when the tech team took part in a global MIT-initiated hackathon on African health systems during the pandemic.

A Laravel 8 v1 API used by the team's Ionic app: sign-up and login with Sanctum, facilities by country and distance, referral creation with patient data, and confirmation by the receiving facility, which then sees origin and destination locations. An admin panel approves new users and manages facilities.

1. 01

   Only the receiving facility can confirm a referral

   The rule lives in the controller, not just the UI: a user from another facility cannot accept the referral.

2. 02

   Accounts pending until approved

   Users registering through the app can only sign in after an admin approves them, with an approval or rejection email — the data is patient data.

3. 03

   Filtering by resources and distance

   Facilities are filtered by bed, test and ventilator availability and ordered by distance from the user.

4. 04

   Model caching and queries with explicit columns

   Model caching and explicit `select()` calls to keep lists fast over the facility dataset.

5. 05

   Versioned, multi-country API

   A `v1` prefix and a country-code filter, so it could grow beyond Mozambique without changing the contract.

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• Laravel
• PHP
• MySQL
• Ionic

health facilities in the dataset

1 589

Business-rule authorisation, query optimisation with caching, and integration with an Ionic client on Android.

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  SDG 3 · Good Health and Well-beingprimary

  Patient referral between health facilities with data on available beds, tests and ventilators, built during COVID-19 to end the door-to-door search for care.

• "Other Apps" page at Equip Mozambique (opens in a new tab)