Demonstration system. All facilities are fictional and all patient flow data is synthetic, calibrated to published national benchmarks. No real patient or facility data is present.

Qala

Patient Flow Intelligence

A queue system for public health facilities that produces the measurement the Department does not currently have — continuously, at every service point, in every facility.

Median visit
3h 18m
NDoH guideline target is under 3 hours
Within 3h target
43%
Share of completed visits meeting the national norm
Left without being seen
7.8%
Not currently tracked nationally

What this does, and what it does not

The evidence is consistent and we will not overstate it: a queue system on its own does not shrink the time a patient spends in a building. Waiting time falls when triage, scheduling and staffing change together. What this system does is make that possible and provable.

  • Enforces clinical priority without starving routine patients, using an accumulating-priority queue rather than strict triage order.
  • Makes the wait legible and fair — patients see their position, and the board states why anyone was called ahead of them.
  • Measures continuously, at every stage, so the Department can find where the time actually goes rather than surveying for it once a quarter.

How a visit is modelled

Two things are tracked independently, and confusing them is the easiest mistake to make about this system.

Where you are — four stages

Every patient walks the same four in order. The counter has a tab per stage because each one holds its own queue, and the constraint moves between them through the day.

  1. 1. Register
  2. 2. Triage
  3. 3. See clinician
  4. 4. Medicine
How urgent you are — four triage levels

Set once at check-in from three observable questions, and re-applied at every stage. This decides your position within a queue, never which queue you join. An orange patient overtakes four separate times.

Five surfaces

Check-in kioskPatient, on arrival

Issues a pseudonymous ticket and a triage category. No name, no ID number.

Waiting room boardEveryone in the room

Calls tickets on a TV, and states why anyone was called out of turn.

Counter consoleClerk and clinician

Call next, start, complete, re-triage, or record a patient who left.

USSD channelPatient, any handset

Queue position and estimated wait on a feature phone. No data cost.

Department dashboardDistrict, province, national

Waiting times, bottlenecks and abandonment, rolled up to national.

Built to fit what already exists

POPIA-safe by design

No name, no ID number, no diagnosis is ever stored. Health data is special personal information under POPIA s26 and prohibited by default. A pseudonymous ticket recording only that someone passed a service point sits outside that gate. A phone number, if given for SMS, is held encrypted for that visit alone and purged when it closes — the persisting tables keep only an irreversible hash.

Complements HPRS and DHIS2

This is not a patient registry and not an EHR. HPRS already holds identity; DHIS2 already carries monthly indicators. Qala adds the real-time flow layer neither provides, and rolls up into indicators that reconcile against the NDoH data dictionary.