2020: A Year in Review

To say the least, 2020 has been a challenging year filled with ups and downs. For healthcare professionals and frontline-responders especially, this year was unlike any other in recent history. The devastating effects of the COVID-19 pandemic for medical professionals and underserved populations alike, meant that many healthcare organizations such as our own were created with the purpose of finding innovative solutions to one of the most pressing challenges of our lifetime. As case numbers of COVID-19 grew around the world, so too did the demand for a service to monitor and document the spread of virus within high-density medical clinics. For our team, these problems were a call to action in the fight against the COVID-19 pandemic. In March 2020, as a direct response to the issues facing health professionals and refugees, our team came together to form Frontida Records - an international nonprofit dedicated to creating modular, cloud-based health documentation solutions for the world’s most vulnerable patient groups and their providers. The inspiration behind the founding of our organization stems from our visit to Camp Moria in Lesvos, Greece. While there, we learned that health providers were overwhelmed with the number of patients requiring treatment each day, and that refugee patients lacked access to their medical records after they left the camp. As well, we found the lack of digitally organized medical records for patients or professionals led to problems such as misdiagnosis. 

After our founding in March, our team began forming a series of partnerships with organizations who are developing and applying healthcare solutions around the world. In November 2020, we began working alongside the Crisis Management Association to create an Electronic Health Record and Central Triage System in the Kara Tepe 2 refugee camp in Lesbos, Greece. We will also begin working with Floating Doctors, a group which brings healthcare and community development to remote and hard to reach areas. Our organizations are coming together to develop an Electronic Health Record (EHR) system for their teams in Panama. We would also like to acknowledge our partners and colleagues at the USC Viterbi School of Engineering, as they have been an essential in helping to expand our network and further our organizational capabilities this year. Lastly, we want to acknowledge our partners at Auth0 and O’Melveny & Meyers LLP, for their help, mentorship and advice relating to different tech-based and legal components of our organization. Our deepest thanks go to all of the aforementioned organizations for their efforts and collaboration with Frontida Records in 2020, and we can’t wait to get started creating positive impacts around the world with them in 2021.  

Throughout the course of 2020 our organization entered a number of different incubators, competitions, and mentorship programs for startup organizations which were essential to our growth as an organization. In the USC Marshall School of Business’s ‘Marshall Grief Incubator’ we were awarded with $10,000 AWS credits along with startup mentorship from industry experts. We also completed the National Academy of Engineering’s COVID-19 Call for Engineering Action Program and the National Science Foundation’s I-Corps Training, which were geared towards creating collaborative environments among different engineering groups, in the effort to find better and more sustainable healthcare solutions during the COVID-19 pandemic. In September, we applied to take part in Enterprise Singapore and Startup SG’s annual Slingshot event, which gathers firms from all over the world to compete in Asia’s most exciting deep-tech startup competition. Frontida Records finished within the Top 20 for the ‘New Normal’ segment of the competition, which was newly introduced in 2020 to highlight startups who are working to alleviate the hardships of the COVID-19 pandemic. This year also saw our organization take part in the Blackstone Techstars Launchpad Fellowship which provided our team with the mentorship, industry expertise, and resources necessary to further develop our capabilities. Throughout this eight-week program, various members of our team attended and participated in virtual workshops with Blackstone and Techstars mentors, where they learned about different organizational standards, methods, and strategies which can be employed by our team to improve our services; we sincerely thank the mentors from Blackstone Techstars for imparting their knowledge and advice onto us. As well, we entered into the Maseeh Entrepreneurship Prize Competition which provided our team with tangible insight about our organizational processes and service structure through a series of workshops. All of the aforementioned programs were massively important to the development of our team and our services this year, and we would like to send our deepest thanks to these organizations for giving us a chance to participate in these events

When looking back on the year 2020 for Frontida Records, we are proud of our team of dedicated members who invested an immense amount of time and resources to develop our organization. At the beginning of this year, Frontida was only a concept among the founding members – an idea of a service which could help underserved patients and health professionals to document medical information. Fast forward to the end of the year, and we are legally filed as a C-corporation under nonprofit status with a team of over 20 individuals dedicated to creating better digital health solutions through our Central Triage System and EHR services. As well, the launch of our website and social media profiles has created a digital presence for Frontida followers around the world. While 2020 was a challenging year for everyone, we can’t help but look back and appreciate the progress we’ve made as an organization. The new year of 2021 offers exciting opportunities, and we can’t wait to get started.