Smooth Sailing with EHRs

July 21, 2022

Equipped with several iPads, the Frontida team supplied Floating Doctors with the tools necessary for sustainable and efficient record keeping. Lugging crates upon crates of paper charts will remain a distant memory for founder Dr. Benjamin LaBrot and his team.

Partnering with Floating Doctors, we traveled to Panama last month to finalize our EHR system for the Ngäbe-Buglé. Their villages lie across the Bocas del Toro Archipelago, dressed by lush mangroves, crab wood, and coconut palm. Under the balmy sun, laughing seagulls float below, children race down the pavement and kinkajous make their routine visits. However, life is far from ideal. Infectious diseases and malnutrition plague communities. Medical staff also lose paper records to water damage, misplace them in mountains of files, or find them marred by illegible handwriting.

Within a week, we launched our system in their clinics at San Cristobal and Tierra Oscura. Across their departments, the Floating Doctors’ staff became nearly 3 minutes faster since beta-launching in October 2021. Frontida’s applications further cut visit and documentation times in half

It comes as no surprise; our program champions navigability and access in environments with or without data and Wifi. Physicians easily located patient profiles, follow-ups, and pharmacy inventories while passively collecting real-time data analytics. Our low-code platform is suited for dynamic conditions, enabling the development and implementation of a dental system within four hours. These last-minute adjustments may send other teams into a tailspin, but we were up for the challenge.

Today, our EHR serves more than 30 communities in the Bocas del Toro region and logs over 800 visits. Frontida would like to thank Floating Doctors, donors, volunteers, families, and friends for the chance to improve the lives of the Ngäbe-Buglé. It was a remarkable experience to see how our collective hard work can make a tangible impact on these clinics.

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