Our new electronic medical record system — and the satellite dish that made it possible
For years, running a mobile medical clinic in a Guatemalan village meant loading boxes.
Paper patient files, hauled out to the truck, driven over roads that barely qualify, carried into a village, spread out on a folding table, and hauled back again at the end of the day. Every visit. Every village. And if a patient we’d seen six months ago showed up at a different clinic than the one where their file lived — we were starting over.
We don’t do that anymore.
What we built, and who built it
Last year we started working with Dennis, our programmer, to build something specific: a cloud-based medical records system that could run in a village field and sync with our medical center, Centro Médico Vida Plena.
It holds patient records with a photo on each one, so we can confirm we have the right patient in front of us. It holds complete visit history. It runs our pharmacy inventory. And it does considerably more than that.
I want to point out something about the decision to build it. We could have tried to buy an off-the-shelf system, and most of them are priced for hospitals and designed for a world with reliable internet and a billing department. We built what we actually needed instead, and we own it. For a ministry that cares about long-term stewardship, that’s not a small distinction.
The part nobody puts in a newsletter
Then came the unglamorous work.
Late last year, Rocio and her crew sat down and entered every existing paper patient file into the new system. Every one. That is tedious, thankless, eye-straining work, and it is the entire reason the system was useful on day one instead of day four hundred.
Because of what they did, when we walked into that first clinic with Chromebooks and tablets instead of boxes, our patients’ histories were already there waiting.
Thank you, Rocio. We saw what that cost you.
The problem that almost stopped everything
Here’s the obstacle that would have ended this project before it started.
In the villages we serve, there is no internet. In many of them, there isn’t even cell service.
A cloud-based system is worthless if you can’t reach the cloud. We could have built the finest records platform in Central America and still been standing in a field with a dead tablet.
The answer was a Starlink Mini dish and a Starlink service plan. We can now set up high-speed internet in every village we serve — in a field, under a tarp, wherever the clinic happens to be that day.
I don’t use the phrase “game changer” lightly. This one earned it.
What a clinic day actually looks like now
Let me walk you through a single patient’s visit, because the system is easiest to understand by watching it work.
1. Check-in. Julio meets the patient at the door with a tablet. If they’ve been seen before, he pulls up their record. If they’re new, he creates one — personal information and a photo, right there.
2. Triage. The patient moves to our triage station, where their vitals are taken and entered directly into that day’s visit.
3. Called by name. When a medical professional is ready, the patient is called — in order, by name.
I want to stop on that one. If you have never waited for free medical care, it may not sound like much. But in a great many places, getting seen depends on being loud, being pushy, or being close to the front. Being called in order, by your name, from a record with your photo on it, is a way of saying: we know who you are, and you don’t have to fight to be treated. That’s dignity, and it’s built into the system rather than left to chance.
4. Pharmacy. When the provider enters a medication order, it appears immediately on the pharmacy computer. Our pharmacy team fills it and passes it to the next station.
5. Instructions. The patient’s record is brought up one more time, and the medicine instructions are explained clearly before they leave.
Five stations, one record, no paper.
Triage, pharmacy, and instructions — all running on one shared record.
Why this changes the medicine, not just the paperwork
Here’s the thing that matters most.
When a patient we see in a village needs more help than a mobile clinic can give, we send them to Centro Médico Vida Plena. And when they arrive, the staff there can pull up that same record — the village visit, the vitals, what they were prescribed, what we found.
No retelling. No gaps. No starting over.
That’s continuity of care, and it’s the difference between a clinic that treats an episode and a ministry that treats a person over time. For families in extreme generational poverty, who are used to being a stranger everywhere they go for help, being known by a medical provider is not a small experience.
Better records. Better service. Better medicine.
Be part of it
Every piece of this — the development work, the tablets and Chromebooks, the Starlink dish and the monthly service — was funded by partners who believed that families in villages deserve the same quality of care as anyone else.
If you’d like to be part of what comes next, we’d welcome you.
