Article taken from www.microsoft.com
I met Dr. Bill and Kathy Magee, the founders of Operation Smile, on a flight from Beijing to Seattle four years ago. Since then, I’ve been part of a team from Microsoft and our partners working with the medical charity to provide technology that helps them advance their goal of healing smiles the world over. It’s one of my favorite parts of my job, and I was honored to attend an Operation Smile mission last November in Hanoi, Vietnam.
Witnessing parents overcome with emotion after their child comes out of an operation that fixed his or her cleft lip or cleft palate is an experience that changes you. The 116 operations completed on the Hanoi mission didn’t just change the lives of the children and their families, it changed the lives of all involved in the process.
So I want to thank Operation Smile for this incredible opportunity. I also want to thank our partners, Sláinte Healthcare and ASUS. They have really stepped up to provide technology that supports the work of Operation Smile and can be used to collect valuable patient data in the diverse and challenging situations in which it conducts its missions.
Operation Smile performs about 180 international missions every year, and the physical location and set of volunteers are different each time. So they need technology that’s flexible and easy to use.
One of the things I was so excited about when I first learned about Sláinte is how their Vitro solution adapts to a health organization’s processes to quickly digitize data and automate workflow. Using Vitro, Sláinte developed an intuitive electronic medical record (EMR) system that meets the specific needs of Operation Smile. It’s quick and easy to learn and it’s enabling them to increase efficiency as well as gain medical insight from the data collected that will help improve care and track outcomes. Operation Smile also hopes that data insights from its EMR will ultimately help the organization identify causes of facial deformities for children. During the Hanoi mission, leaders from Operation Smile and Slainte were interviewed about how Vitro is helping Operation Smile scale and make a greater impact, which you can see in this video.
The first morning of the Hanoi mission, all of the volunteers were walked through how to use the Sláinte EMR on ASUS Transformer 2-in-1 devices running Windows 8. After just that one walk-through, everyone was up and running. Using the solution, the team captured data from 284 patient assessments in just a day and a half. The assessments were conducted at seven different stations, where patients would meet with a nurse and a speech pathologist, get their blood pressure measured, and so on. Information from each station had to be passed to the next, which all went off without a hitch. The fact that 40-plus volunteers were able to utilize the EMR with just a few minutes of training speaks volumes about Vitro’s ability to easily automate workflow.
And the 11-hour battery in the ASUS devices meant that volunteers could work a full day without having to recharge. What’s more, because it’s a 2-in-1 device, they could use the keyboard to quickly input data and then walk around with it as a tablet, when that was better suited to what they were doing.
It was an incredible privilege to witness the impact of Operation Smile. Along with our partners, we at Microsoft Health look forward to continuing our efforts to provide technology that helps them scale their amazing work to transform children’s lives around the globe.
Link to: www.microsoft.com Blog