Continual Care Using Mobile Applications: Life Is Great Foundation’s Triage to Discharge (T2D) Humanitarian Healthcare Breakthrough

October 23rd, 2014
Bita Milanian, Senior Vice President of Marketing Communications, GENBAND

Earlier this year, I was blessed to be introduced to Dr. David Rhew, Chief Medical Officer of Samsung, when he delivered a keynote address at GENBAND’s Perspectives14 customer and partner summit in Orlando. I was drawn in to his vision for wellness enabled by such innovations as Samsung’s Gear Fit device, and Life Fit application embedded into the Galaxy S4.

Dr. Rhew and colleagues from Samsung entertained the nearly 800 people in the audience with a live demonstration of how individuals and their healthcare teams can collaborate around data that is collected on “vitals” and sent through the cloud to a physician or specialist.

In a conversation with Dr. Rhew, I learned that his vision for healthcare also extends to those in the world who may not be able to afford this kind of awesome technology, and who in fact may have zero access to care and wrote about this in an earlier column. Dr. Rhew introduced me to Ernani Sadural, a medical schoolmate, who with his wife Sarah Timmapuri, established the Life Is Great Foundation which triggered an amazing series of events, including GENBAND and its summer interns hosting a dinner for the Life is Great team in New York City this summer, and shared this in my personal blog, B the Change.

During this event, we learned about the incredible work LIG has been doing for years, sending physicians to countries including Haiti, Dominican Republic, Philippines, India and more, to provide not only emergency care after natural disasters, but also surgical and preventative care. Their programs for detection and treatment of cervical cancer, for example, are unique and lifesaving.

I also learned in the process of spending time with the team that one of their differentiators, compared to Doctors Without Borders, for example, is that they make it possible for medical professionals and others to embark on 1-2 week trips (vs. having to commit to six months or longer) while also “staying connected” to their patients.

What “staying connected” has meant is returning to the physical location to check in with patients and their families, but now the technology team at LIG is on track to deliver Internet-based continual care using Samsung devices.

The first phase of the development of an awesome application – Triage to Discharge – has proven very effective in enabling volunteers onsite to “triage” up to 1,000 patients a day.

The application was successfully used during a trip to the Philippines with youth volunteers able to download this free application and start entering patient data which is stored in the cloud, creating a simple and secure health record that can be referred to in the future, as the LIG team now tracks and helps provide continual care.

A team in Peru lead by one of the LIG volunteers, Dr. Victor Campos, is currently using Skype to stay in touch with clinicians and patients from the US and elsewhere, and with learnings from this and integration services lead by Surya Kuchimanchi, one of the founders and board members of Life is Great – in the near future LIG will roll out even more capabilities alongside the “T2D” application.

GENBAND is proud to be working with LIG to help them raise visibility and funds in order to grow so they can expand their reach, particularly with software Real-Time Communications solutions. We’ll share more in the future, but you can only imagine how powerful a tool WebRTC would be in bringing people together for videoconferencing to serve people in need in real-time.

The work of the LIG team is beyond inspiring. They are leading in humanitarian service empowered and accelerated by modern communications software and networks, while being able to measure the impact, and generate even more support – a model that scales.