Offline is the normal case
Fikacare is built for a hospital where the internet, the power or a machine will fail today. Nothing you do waits on a network.
3 min read
Most hospital software treats the internet as normal and an outage as an emergency. In a Nigerian hospital that is the wrong way round. The line goes. The power goes. A machine gets dropped, or stolen, or simply stops. Software that only works when everything is well is software that does not work.
So Fikacare is built the other way. Every machine holds the hospital's records itself. The network is how machines catch each other up, not how they do their work.
What this means at your desk
Nothing you do waits on a connection. Registering a patient, opening a visit, writing a consultation note, taking a payment and printing the receipt all happen on the machine in front of you, at the speed of the machine in front of you. If the line is down you will not find out from a spinning wheel, because there is nothing to spin.
You find out from the banner, which tells you plainly how long it has been since this machine last spoke to another one. See Reading the banner.
You can work all day disconnected. The hospital has run a full day with the internet cut, and everything reconciled afterwards. That is a tested property of the software, not a hope.
What you cannot do offline
Very little, and nothing clinical or financial. What needs the cloud is the work of changing what the system is, not using it:
- Adding a member of staff, or changing somebody's role.
- Changing prices, tariffs or the drug catalogue.
- Approving a new machine, or changing what a machine is allowed to do.
These are cloud-owned on purpose — see What the cloud decides and what it never touches. They are also things nobody does in the middle of a clinic.
The one thing to understand
While a machine is offline it knows everything it has seen, and nothing about what other machines have done since. If reception registers a patient on the front-desk machine while the consulting room is cut off, the consulting room will not know about that patient until the two speak again.
This is not a fault and it cannot be designed away — it is what being disconnected means. What Fikacare does is make it visible, so you never read a screen believing it is current when it is not. Every screen that shows you something another machine might have changed carries its age.