Making decision support the standard care for short-term medical missions

September 1, 2016 | Christopher Dainton

A young patient arrives in your makeshift medical mission clinic, set up inside a schoolhouse in the host community. Her mother tells you that she has been losing weight, and she has mild abdominal pain at times. You suppose she could have parasites, but you can’t recall the correct medication, nor the dose. You’d like to look it up online but – alas – you’re in the mountains of Central America and there is nary a 4G signal for miles. On-the-spot decision support might be a useful solution for deciding how to treat your patient.

Remote mobile medical clinic

Short-term medical missions and medical service trips are often unfamiliar practice environments for even experienced Western clinicians. If my first experiences are any indication, confusion and culture shock might be the most common experience for first-time medical mission clinicians waking up for the first time in a remote, low resource setting. Although the trip might last only a week, doctors may be faced with unfamiliar symptoms and tropical diseases that they have never encountered before, and that they may not have read about since medical school.

In these situations, timely and relevant information might be all the clinician needs to guide his or her diagnosis and management plan – for example, albendazole 400mg once for patients with poor appetite and nonspecific abdominal pain, for the presumptive treatment of parasites. This information has become known as decision support, and it has become more and more common in electronic medical record systems in the Western world.

QuickChart EMR login screen on backpack

We’ve incorporated the same type of decision support into QuickChart EMR, our portable electronic medical records app. You can download QuickChart EMR for Android smartphones for free on Google Play, or explore our preliminary medical mission guidelines on this site. We would be honoured to hear your thoughts on our decision support guidelines, or on the app itself.

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