Anatomy of a Go-Live

SECTOR UPDATE - BES International

Last month, Tamanu EMR went live across all inpatient wards and departments at Samoa's Tupua Tamasese Meaole (TTM) in a single day. It was the largest single-day digital health go-live in the Pacific this year, and the result of twelve months of preparation.

For readers, the interesting part isn't the ‘flip the switch’ moment, it's the model behind it. In lower-resourced settings, the well-resourced go-live approach, with dedicated project offices, months of parallel running and considerable budgets - simply doesn't apply. Achieving a safe, complete transition to digital records across a 200-bed tertiary hospital happens with a fraction of the resource. But lower-resourced does not mean lower-standard. It means different, and it means smarter. 

In the week before go-live, BES staff and Samoa's own Change Champions worked ward by ward in high-vis vests, testing equipment and fielding questions, backed by control rooms on-site and in Suva running around the clock. After a final walk-through the night before, Tamanu switched on across all 19 wards at 6am on the 13th of July. 

The staff who mattered most weren't the most technically credentialed; they understood what it means to run a busy ward with a shared laptop between three nurses and intermittent power as the norm. Placing people with that lived experience alongside local teams changes a go-live entirely.

Samoa’s Ministry of Health IT and Health Information teams led the project throughout, with BES providing technical support. From go-live, every incoming patient at TTM now has a fully digital experience, all clinical data running through Tamanu, making huge strides in providing continuity of care.

TTM is now the sixth national (and second largest)  hospital in the Pacific to run Tamanu across all departments, part of a regional effort spanning New Zealand, Fiji, Australia and Samoa, building a peer network that can eventually work independently of BES. The data backs it: since 2021, Tamanu has recorded 1.2 million encounters and 4.6 million clinical events across Samoa, with 74,000 patients now having encounters logged across multiple facilities, demonstrating real longitudinal, connected care that supports a people-centred approach to health service delivery.

Delivered with support from DFAT's Partnerships for a Healthy Region, the World Bank Group, and Palladium's Tautua Human Development for All Program.

Source: BES International media release

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