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Friday, May 25, 2012

Quality--Standards of Care for medical mission trips

One of the great things about medical mission trips is that the record keeping is much less than our daily office or hospital lives.  In fact, on some clinic days, it is barely existent.  It feels great to not have a pile of paperwork staring you in the face at the end of the day.
We are changing that.
While we have no love of paperwork (just ask the nurses at my office), haphazard record keeping is not helping the patients we go to Haiti to serve.  We have a responsibility to our patients to document their care.  Turn it around.  If you were seeing a physician, and they kept no record of your condition or the medication they prescribed, would that be acceptable to you?
It is not acceptable to us.  It is tedious to document, but it is important.

This last trip, we started using a new encounter form that can document multiple visits, a problem list, medication list, and a photo.  We purchased a mobile printer  (Canon PIXMA iP100 Color Ink-jet printer)
 to print photos for those chart. We would like to work as the guinea pigs for developing a standard for medical mission groups working out of HCM  as well as other areas where we expand.
We will also audit a portion of the charts randomly for completeness and best practices.
If anyone knows of an easy way to do this electronically, I am all ears...We will be looking for low-cost portable electronic medical records as those would be ideal for our needs.

Starting with our next trip, we will require all applicants to submit current credentials, licensing, and each team member will apply for a specific role within the team (at least for the medical members).  All medical professionals will only be asked to function within their normal scope of practice on the trip.

Our name tags, starting next trip, will be issued as photo ID badges (we used ID badge-like name tags for this last trip, but no photos).

We have been working on a standardized formulary based on cost and appropriateness for the population we are serving.  We will develop standard dosing guides with recommendations for all medications within our formulary.

Finally, we will begin to offer at least two hours of medical education per trip on regionally specific conditions.  I will work to get those accredited for CME and CEU credits.

Our goal is to keep the standard of care on our mission trips as close as reasonably possible to the standard of care at home.  We welcome any suggestions in the comments here or on the facebook page.

5 comments:

  1. I am developing a mobile patient data collection app for ipad for our Haiti Medical Mission. I would love to chat about what type of information you collect from patients.

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  2. When is your next planned medical mission trip? I have always felt lead to be a part of a team on a medical mission, and would love to be able to have that experience. I have traveled with my church group on missions, but not medical trips. I would be interested if the opportunity was available.
    Cindy Martensen RN

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  3. I am interested in a medical mission trip. I have done missions with my church, but never medical missions. Do you have another trip planned? If the opportunity was available, I would be interested.
    Cindy Martensen RN. Capital Region.

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    1. Hi Cindy, We have a mission upcoming Dec 1-9, 2012, May 2013, Nov 2013. You may contact missions@ke-nou.org for more information.

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  4. Thanks. I will contact them. I accidentally posted twice, didn't think the first one went through. I have done church missions with our church but never a medical mission. I have loved the experiences I have been fortunate to have with our church missions. Thanks again for the response. Cindy Martensen.

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