International Travel Tips during COVID-19

International Travel Tips during COVID-19

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

 

Binary Bridge Joins Social Enterprise Accelerator Halcyon!

Binary Bridge Joins Social Enterprise Accelerator Halcyon!

Binary Bridge has officially joined the Halcyon Incubator for their Spring 2021 cohort! Halcyon is located in Washington DC, and runs a residential and virtual fellowship that “equips early-stage social entrepreneurs with the support they need to transform audacious ideas into scalable and sustainable ventures, and change the world.” We are proud and honored to have been selected from the large number of applicants!

Our program will start in February 2021, and will include 5 months of intense mentorship from Halycon’s global advisor network, along with weekly session programming, group events, and pitch practice. The support won’t end in June, though, as Halcyon continues to mentor fellows for 18 months to ensure success!

We are excited to hear new ideas for BackpackEMR, and how we can better serve the medical teams working in rural communities overseas.

We are also looking forward to meeting the other 7 cohort organizations, along with paired advisors, and can’t wait to get started. Below are some of the amazing success statistics for what Halcyon has accomplished so far! Visit Halcyon’s site for more information on their impact in the social enterprise community.

 Thank you for this amazing opportunity, Halcyon!! 

BackpackEMR Awarded Project of the Year!

BackpackEMR Awarded Project of the Year!

Couchbase, a provider of BackpackEMR’s core technology, awarded our solution Project of the Year! We are so excited to receive this award after years of refining our offline data-sharing capabilities using Couchbase’s feature set. 

Haven’t heard about Couchbase? We’re about to get technical, but if you want to know more about Couchbase’s capabilities, read on! 

Unlike other NoSQL databases, Couchbase provides an enterprise-class, multi-cloud to edge database that offers the robust capabilities required for business-critical applications on a highly scalable and available platform. As a distributed cloud-native database, Couchbase runs in modern dynamic environments and on any cloud, either customer-managed or fully managed as-a-service. Couchbase is built on open standards, combining the best of NoSQL with the power and familiarity of SQL, to simplify the transition from mainframe and relational databases.

Some of Couchbase’s customers include industry leaders Amadeus, American Express, Carrefour, Cisco, Comcast/Sky, Disney, eBay, LinkedIn, Marriott, Tesco, Tommy Hilfiger, United, Verizon, as well as hundreds of other household names. For more information, go to www.couchbase.com.  

Check out the announcement on Globe News Wire to hear more about our partnership and accomplishments together!

BackpackEMR Releases the Much-Anticipated Virtual Care Platform!

BackpackEMR Releases the Much-Anticipated Virtual Care Platform!

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. 

Brenda Henry Joins Binary Bridge!

Brenda Henry Joins Binary Bridge!

Binary Bridge is excited to welcome Brenda Henry as our new Sales and Account Lead! 

Brenda has a 20+ year career in marketing, business development, and account management. In some of her previous roles, she’s managed consumer education programs for medical devices, marketing and outreach for study abroad programs, and worked with large, national brands, managing deliverables for package design, product development, branding and product naming. 

She’s worked with companies of all types and sizes, including the small, non-profit branding organization called Good Thinking Atlanta, and international companies like Boston Scientific. She enjoys getting to know her clients, and their organization’s needs, so she can provide them with the best solutions.

Brenda’s experience is a great fit for Binary Bridge, and we can’t wait to have her work with the amazing organizations checking out BackpackEMR for their medical teams.

One in a Million Award Recipient

One in a Million Award Recipient

We are honored to be recognized by Multiplying Good as a One In A Million award recipient. Awards are granted to people or organizations who are putting others first and using service as a solution to the problems we’re facing. 

Binary Bridge is using BackpackEMR to help increase access to healthcare and improve the quality of care for underserved communities in rural locations.  

We want to thank Jeff Urban for nominating us, and Multiplying Good for the award! Check out the article here.

Let’sall continue to do good!