Meet BackpackEMR at Disasters Expo Texas 2026

When a hurricane, flood, or earthquake knocks out power and internet, the need for medical care goes up, not down. That’s exactly the setting BackpackEMR was built for, and it’s why we’re excited to be exhibiting at Disasters Expo Texas 2026, October 14–15 at the George R. Brown Convention Center in Houston.

Disasters Expo brings together emergency managers, first responders, public health officials, and relief organizations to share the tools and strategies that keep communities safe before, during, and after a disaster. It’s a great fit for us: BackpackEMR has supported healthcare teams in more than 42 countries, often in places where infrastructure is unreliable or simply gone.

See a field clinic in action. At our booth, we’re setting up a working mock clinic with stations for Triage, Treatment, and Pharmacy. Watch a patient record move from one iPad to the next in real time, with no internet, no cloud, and no power grid required. Devices connect directly to each other, so your team can be up and running in minutes, not days.

We’ll also be showing our new inventory management features. Follow a prescription from Treatment to Pharmacy and see stock levels update as medications are dispensed, so your team always knows what’s on the shelf.

Whether you’re preparing for the next hurricane season or supporting response teams around the world, we’d love to talk with you about keeping patient records safe when infrastructure fails.

📍 Find us at Booth 406
📄 Download our Disaster Response flyer
🎟️ Register for free

Can’t make it to Houston? Click here to schedule a demo.

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!