QuickChart mobile EHR wins Most Promising Innovation

October 20, 2018 | Christopher Dainton

A long overdue update. We’re excited to announce that our QuickChart mobile EHR won “Most Promising Innovation” and led the social innovation category at the 2018 World Health Innovation Academy in Hong Kong.

QuickChart mobile EHR most promising innovation WHIA

Bringing the QuickChart mobile EHR to WHIA 2018

August is the middle of monsoon season, which means nearly continuous rain for weeks, followed shortly after by typhoon season. Here’s a typical view of the late summer weather looking across
Victoria Harbour. Hong Kong Polytechnic University hosted this year’s pitch competition, which brought together the thirteen winning teams from their respective categories in Canada (University of Calgary and St. Michael’s Hospital), Switzerland, and Hong Kong. We pitched our mobile electronic
health record (mobile EHR) app for non-government organizations (NGOs) working in resource-limited settings.

Click here for the link to our video of the mobile EHR prototype from the competition in Calgary last year.

The Hong Kong pitch competition was the culmination of a long process of business development and pitch practice that began after we won at W21C for Best Social Innovation in November 2017. We are eternally grateful to our many partners in the startup community: W21C, John from OpenCity, Jacob George from Communitech, Kris Hans from Market Grade, and Jeffery Potvin from Opn Ninja.

Christopher Dainton pitching QuickChart mobile EHR at WHIA

Our pitch for a mobile EHR for global health

Two days of competition, beginning first with a scientific pitch, and then followed by an investment pitch by the finalists. We opened our pitch by describing the challenges faced by thousands of healthcare NGOs. Across the developing world, clinicians work in village clinics providing intermittent
primary care to patients in rural settings. For me, that meant volunteering as a doctor on short trips to Guatemala, Ecuador, Dominican Republic, and other countries across Central and South America.

But that care can be disjointed, since doctors only arrive in these communities every few months. What’s more, Western doctors working in those clinics might have limited experience working in
resource-limited settings. That means their care can be highly variable, and often substandard. Finally, NGOs keeping paper medical records often have great difficulty collecting the kind of outcome metrics that global health advocates (and donors) now demand. All of this leads to the question: Do these medical missions have a measurable impact at all?

That set the stage for our unique mobile EHR app, with its integrated clinical decision support for resource-limited settings. The QuickChart mobile EHR can be rapidly deployed on any Android smartphone. It supports clinical care with evidence-based, point of care guidelines. It allows offline charting in off-grid locations where even electricity is sporadic. Then we explained that all of this means safer care for patients, and more cost-effective care for NGOs.

QuickChart mobile EHR WHIA competitors

A strong performance by W21C and the University of Calgary

Inspiring pitches all round – my personal favorite was a Swiss team’s development of a robotic arm controlled by facial gestures and intended to help patients with upper limb paralysis to gain independence. A big congratulations to the overall winners who also came from the University of Calgary, Montane Medical with their prototype for a multifunctional laryngoscope.

Christopher Dainton QuickChart mobile EHR poster

What’s next for the QuickChart mobile EHR app?

Find our new video here.

We’re looking forward to the release of the cloud version of the mobile EHR for its first round of beta testing. Email us here (cdainton@medicalservicetrip.com) to be among the first to test the mobile EHR
interface and give us your feedback.

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