International Travel Tips during COVID-19

International Travel Tips during COVID-19

by | Dec 9, 2021 | COVID-19, News

With all of the travel restrictions with COVID-19, we wanted to share some thoughts from the experts at Mission Nation on how you can best prepare for upcoming trips.

Mission Nation has over 200 years of combined experience working with traveling medical teams. They’ve worked through all kinds of travel crises, and they have put together a list of tips while traveling in this new COVID-19 era:

  1. Use a travel agent that can assist you in emergency situations and will track your travels while you are abroad. Keep their contact information with you and expect to have to use it.
  2. Do not book online fares during this period. Airlines will refer you back to an online carrier for help you need or should have from the airline or your travel professional.
  3. Multiple checks on travel requirements for destination and transit points leading up to travel date. This is a team effort. If you have information from your sources on the ground, it is very helpful to share with the travel agent. Things are changing rapidly.
  4. Pack properly with a two day supply in a carry on bag. Bring extra meds should you be quarantined.
  5. Plan your Covid testing options ahead of time.
  6. Buy insurance that will help with Covid related costs.
    • Trip delay, interruption, medical and evacuation costs can be substantial
    • Recent group trip to GUA turned into an extended 14 day ordeal at airport hotel awaiting release. Hotel and meals costs were upwards of $2500 each person.
    • Other insurance suggestions:
      • Under the Emergency Medical Expense Benefit: Emergency medical expenses for an insured who becomes ill with COVID-19 and requires medical treatment while on their trip.
      • Under the Emergency Medical Evacuation Benefit: Transportation to a higher level of care for an insured when their condition is acute, severe or life threatening as a result of contracting COVID-19 while on their trip. Transport must be authorized as medically necessary by the attending Physician and our Program Assistance Provider.
  7. Prepare to be flexible
    • 40% of all tickets issued for international travel in the past 6 months have had to be reissued due to airline schedule changes.
    • Once you accept a free change when schedule changes do occur, airlines will charge you to change to the flight added next week with a better schedule for you!
    • Airline schedule changes are occurring daily.
  8. Sign up for State Department STEP program for travel abroad.
  9. Do NOT use split ticketing options.
    • Due to significant schedule changes, using multiple tickets on an itinerary can bring unforeseen costs to changes on one ticket while the other had schedule change.
  10. Laminate a copy of your vaccine card, shrink to wallet size. Keep a couple copies as well as a photo of it on your phone.

Feel free to use the COVID-19 resources available on Mission Nation’s website.

https://www.missionnation.com/covid

 

Sierra Leone: Seeing Patients Remotely with Virtual Care

Sierra Leone: Seeing Patients Remotely with Virtual Care

by | Jan 8, 2021 | COVID-19, Medical Missions, Technology

Have you considered ways to help your patients remotely during COVID-19? Our new partner, African Christian Fellowship South Region (ACF), saw 250 patients in Sierra Leone using BackpackEMR’s new Virtual Care features! The medical team included 5 physicians from Nigeria and the US who could not join in-person, but were able to “see” patients virtually.

COVID-19 Challenges

ACF’s volunteer physicians have been unable to travel for medical outreaches due to COVID-19 travel restrictions. This has left underserved communities in Sierra Leone without healthcare for almost a year. But, with a strong in-country team on the ground, ACF knew they could still coordinate the outreaches, as long as they could get medical expertise to the team remotely.

This is where BackpackEMR could help!

We sent equipment to ACF’s team in Sierra Leone, and we held 2 quick training sessions over Zoom to get the organizers up to speed on BackpackEMR. It didn’t take long for them to catch on! The next day they trained in the rest of the outreach team, and were ready to go.

Clinic Days!

ACF spent 4 days running medical outreaches. The local team included several nurses who captured patient intake and vitals, and one physician who was able to see patients in-person. Physicians in Nigeria and the US were able to help with patient consults by logging into BackpackEMR’s new web portal from their homes to view patient charts. They could “see” patient using video chat sessions, and they could review intake and vitals information in BackpackEMR’s web portal, just as if they were in person.

And, when the internet was down, the local team was still able to facilitate the clinic with BackpackEMR’s offline network. Remote physicians could review the patient charts afterwards, and give feedback on diagnoses and treatment plans.

 Encouraging Feedback

ACF’s clinics were the “talk of the town” with the high-quality of the care they were providing and the unexpected technology of BackpackEMR and video chats with physicians in other countries. ACF now has a way to see more patients consistently and at a lower overall cost without requiring physicians to be in-person.

Pastor Victor Nwoji, ACF’s Sierra Leone Coordinator, explained, “Hopefully, we have a major breakthrough in mission outreaches as we cannot only depend on doctors on the ground, but also doctors across borders that can now be a part [of future clinics].”

If you’d like to learn more about how you could use BackpackEMR to see patients remotely using Virtual Care, please send us an email Brenda.Henry@BackpackEMR.com , or book a meeting here: Brenda’s Calendar

We wish much success to you and your organizations in 2021 and beyond!

BackpackEMR Releases the Much-Anticipated Virtual Care Platform!

BackpackEMR Releases the Much-Anticipated Virtual Care Platform!

by | Dec 4, 2020 | COVID-19, Innovation, News

We are excited to launch our NEW Virtual Care services to help medical teams get back to their mission of providing healthcare to underserved communities overseas.

As word of COVID-19 spread in early 2020, we saw travel restrictions kick in. The pandemic was preventing medical teams from visiting the communities that they have been supporting for years. Organizations began the process of restructuring their support to these communities, including sending supplies or providing financial support instead of providing medical care. 

We wanted to help, and searched for ways to reach patients remotely. In the US, this meant telemedicine. But we knew that without access to consistent internet, most of these communities would be unable to support the typical video chat. So, we enhanced BackpackEMR with a Virtual Care process that allows local teams to visit individual patients safely, capture health information while offline, and upload patient charts to the cloud. If the local team requests a remote consult, a notification will go to the requested provider who can securely log into our new Web Portal from anywhere – even their couch!

We also found some unexpected benefits to the new Web Portal and Virtual Care features that will continue post-COVID restrictions: 

1. LOCAL DEVELOPMENT: Local teams are now empowered with more leadership and control of healthcare in their communities. And, with future clinical decision support tools and predictive analytics to help suggest diagnosis or treatments, we can further empower local teams to see patients for routine visits.

2. COST SAVINGS: Medical teams can now follow up with patients remotely at any time, so large, expensive, in-person clinics can be made more infrequently, saving time, money, and resources.

3. SUSTAINABILITY: Operations can become more sustainable with remote access during future pandemics, civil unrest, or natural disasters.

4. INCREASED ENGAGEMENT: Medical volunteers that are no longer able to travel or cannot afford to travel can stay engaged by providing remote consults.

We have had a great response from medical organizations! Several groups are planning to use our Virtual Care features in December, so make sure to sign up for our Newsletter if you want hear how they go!

And, if you’d like to understand how the Virtual Care platform can keep your medical volunteers engaged, schedule a quick 15 minute chat here and demo the platform today. 

BackpackEMR Selected for gBETA COVID-19 Innovation Showcase

BackpackEMR Selected for gBETA COVID-19 Innovation Showcase

by | Jul 17, 2020 | COVID-19, Event, Innovation, News

gBETA selected BackpackEMR from over 100 applicants to present at gBETA’s Midwest COVID-19 Innovation Showcase. We presented with 13 other incredible startups who all quickly transitioned during the pandemic to support medical teams fighting the coronavirus.

In March, we saw that any patient-tracking tools, including in remote locations within low-income countries, would need to track COVID-19 symptoms and risk factors. So we added the WHO and CDC-recommended COVID-19 surveys into BackpackEMR, along with creating robust COVID-19 case-tracking dashboards for governments or regions.

Additionally, we have been working closely with traveling medical teams who are no longer able to see patients in remote villages due to travel restrictions. They are anxious to find ways to continue to provide healthcare from afar, so we are working on building Virtual Visits (or “asynchronous telemedicine”) into BackpackEMR.

 

You can watch the full showcase here – and make sure to check out our presentation of COVID-19 modifications in BackpackEMR at minute 46:05!

New Innovations Post-COVID for Healthcare in Extreme Conditions

New Innovations Post-COVID for Healthcare in Extreme Conditions

by | Jun 18, 2020 | COVID-19, Event, Innovation

Now with the highly-contagious COVID-19 affecting the world, humanitarians can no longer travel to rural villages in need of healthcare, and if they did, they risk bringing an outbreak of COVID-19 with them.

In this MedFuse Midyear session, we talked about how the virus has forced global digital health tools like BackpackEMR:

1. To transform into COVID-tracking tools for individuals or country-wide rollouts
2. To create a new model for traveling medical teams to help remote populations
3. To build a sustainable model for long-term, local healthcare development

To view this recorded session, click on this link, and log into your MedFuse Midyear 2020 account:

https://iotfusedigital.confrnz.com/conferences/48/presentations/356

Webinar: Fundraising in a Post-COVID World

Webinar: Fundraising in a Post-COVID World

by | May 22, 2020 | COVID-19, Event, Medical Missions

Raising money is especially challenging when the world is experiencing widespread financial uncertainty, and donors are closely managing their money. We had the privilege to bring Nathan Ruby, a nonprofit fundraising consultant, to host this interactive webinar. In this webinar, Nathan talked about how to adjust  fundraising strategy in today’s uncertain environment, three trends of fundraising in the future, and some practical steps Executive Directors and Founders can take in the near future.

Key points:

Learn more about Ruby & Associates: https://www.rubyassoc.com/

Follow BackpackEMR on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/BackpackEMR/