What do you think the general reaction is from a crowd of medical professionals when your presentation is on… electronic medical records!?

After 8+ years of giving presentations on EMRs, I definitely know that I need to consider my audience, and be sensitive to how much medical providers (in general!) DETEST their EMRs here in the United States. I wanted the providers to see the simplicity of BackpackEMR while experiencing it for themselves – but my challenge was to get them motivated to try it out in the first place.

Queue up… CRAFTING! I decided to dedicate some time to finding generally-loved famous people, printing out full-sized headshots, cutting them out, laminating them, and putting them “on a stick”!

I also included names, demographics, history, and complaints on the back to help attendees focus on the EMR and charting, rather than coming up with their own information to enter.

I’m not sure if the heads helped, but I was surprised at how eager many providers were to jump on the iPads and enter a few patient details.

This workshop was fun for me, too, because I was able to highlight the real reasons for implementing an EMR during mobile clinics:

1. Improve patient outcomes with access to patients’ medical histories, providing true continuity of care

2. Provide real impact metrics to donors and staff, not just #’s of patients seen

3. Better serve communities with data on treatment efficacy and education opportunities

If you’re looking for a fun way to introduce your staff to an EMR, consider making some props to help ease them into a new way of documenting their patients’ health data. After using the system and seeing the benefits, they will absolutely embrace the change.

The world’s largest unmet disability is poor vision, and Global Vision 2020 is determined to help solve this major gap with a cost-effective way to provide eyeglasses in minutes. Their system is called the USee Vision Kit, and it includes an easy-to-use dial method to determine a person’s prescription. They also provide a kit of universal frames in various colors, and individual lenses for both eyes. This allows the glasses provider the ability to snap in the correct lenses for each eye separately to ensure accurate prescriptions in minutes! Each pair of completed glasses costs less than $5 each!

Several BackpackEMR partners are also using the USee Vision Kit for their mobile clinics, so we decided to include Global Vision 2020’s data points into BackpackEMR. Now teams can seamlessly use the USee Vision Kit, and track the prescription and glasses in BackpackEMR, along with the rest of the patient’s medical information.

The Global Missions Health Conference in Louisville is quite an energizing experience!

If you haven’t been there before, it’s a conference dedicated to people who are looking to bring medical care to underserved populations in rural areas all over the world. It was my first time attending in person last week, and it was inspiring to be around so many people doing such great work!

Even though it was MY first GMHC, it marked 6 years of attendance for BackpackEMR. As in years past, we had a booth to show demos of our software. People loved seeing how the EMR software connects the iPads WITHOUT the internet, and WITHOUT electricity. The solar panel, battery backup, and rugged router were all on display, running 3 iPads in different languages! It was fun to show people in person how quickly (and securely!) the patient information moves from one iPad, to another, enabling a large volume of patients to stay organized.

Beyond our booth, the breakout meetings and plenary sessions were also a fantastic source of inspiration and information. Friday morning’s plenary session discussed the importance of reliable, trusted data to help combat medical misinformation. One of the reasons our partners choose BackpackEMR is for the data in our auto-generated reports, which allow organizations to quickly see exactly how many patients they’ve helped at their clinics, most common illnesses, and types of treatment plans that were successful—and report that to the ministries of health, and to their donors to show their impact.

If you missed me at the show—no problem. Feel free to click here to book a no-pressure meeting with me. I’d love to meet you!

I had the amazing opportunity to join Dr. Bertalan Meshko, Director of The Medical Futurist, in a Fireside Chat in this CXO Sync Event, sponsored by our tech-partner, Couchbase. 

We discussed how COVID-19 has changed digital health worldwide, including in low-middle income countries, and how behaviors and mindsets have changed to support it. It was interesting to talk about different innovations across the world that have accelerated their rollouts with the increased acceptance of digital health solutions.

Event Description:

What if personalized medical care had no boundaries? Consumer and patient needs are constantly changing, and because of that, we need to also change.

Digital transformation in healthcare is a must for those looking to better the consumer/patient experience. Within this webinar, we will hear from two experts to discuss the future of Healthcare applications and digital transformation in the healthcare industry.

Join us to explore:

• How innovative mobile solutions are shaping the future of healthcare with high-performance, scalable applications that work anywhere
• How we can utilize technology to see more patients, reduce cost, and cut manual processes
• How we can continue to work even if offline

In case you missed it, you can watch our session HERE!

GHIC 2021 – We had the opportunity to present a session at the Global Health Innovation Conference 2021, sponsored by Unite for Sight and Northwestern University, on April 8-11. Our session “Join Us! Virtual Support for Unlimited High-Quality Care” highlighted 2 of our partners, Blessings International and the African Christian Fellowship (ACF), and focused on our joint work to provide virtual care to rural communities.

Blessings International

In our pre-recorded video, Barry Ewy, CEO of Blessings International, talked about exporting high-quality, verified medications to medical teams providing healthcare in low-middle income countries (LMICs) during COVID-19. Counterfeit and substandard drugs are a growing problem in several LMICs, and Blessings is able to ensure quality medications by exporting directly to the medical professionals overseas.

Blessings International measures their impact by a factor called their “Human Treatment Value”. It consists of 2 numbers aggregated together to estimate the # of lives touched. The first value is the the Daily Treatment Value, which is the # of days a medication helps a patient – for example, any daily medication indicates a day of treatment per pill. The second value is a Curative Treatment, which is a medication meant to cure, such as Malaria medications or antibiotics. Over the past fiscal year, Blessings had a Human Treatment Value of 95 Million, which translates to an estimated 4 Million lives touched!

African Christian Fellowship

Dr. Joyce Olutade with the ACF-South Region and Victor Nwoji with the ACF-South Region’s Samuel Town Clinic in Sierra Leone also joined the discussion to talk about working with Blessings and BackpackEMR to bring virtual care to rural communities in Sierra Leone, despite ACF doctors’ inability to join the mobile clinics in-person. They highlighted the ability for doctors in the US and in Nigeria to view patient details from their homes using BackpackEMR’s web portal, and to give feedback to local health workers on diagnosis and treatment in real-time. The remote doctors were also able to see the list of medications that Blessings exported and that were available to prescribe to patients from within BackpackEMR, as well.

We are very thankful to both of our partners for contributing to this video and for partnering with us on virtual care. We can’t wait to collaborate again!

And, if you provide any of the following services, and would like to partner with us to provide virtual care, please reach out to us:  Solutions@BackpackEMR.com

1. Rural Medical Teams
2. Virtual Patient Chart Reviews
3. AI and Predictive Analytics / Decision Support
4. Portable Diagnostic Devices

You can watch our session HERE!