A nonprofit outreach group that provides medical care to the homeless in Santa Barbara, California, has developed its own mobile electronic health record to help them treat patients, according to the Daily Nexus. Doctors without Walls-Santa Barbara Street Medicine, affiliated with the University of California at Santa Barbara, needed a mobile, customized EHR that could be used in areas that may lack outlets and continuous Wi-Fi connectivity. Finding available EHRs too expensive, several UCSB gradates developed a home-grown EHR system on top of the preexisting system and incorporating Microsoft Access and Office 365.
"Existing systems had various obstacles," Cole Denkensohn, a UCSB graduate who helped design the system, said. "Some were too expensive for our non-profit to afford. Others were very rigid in their design or difficult to modify. This was a challenge for us since the street medicine model is in many ways different than traditional medical models."
The group has now transitioned completely away from paper records, according to the Nexus. Article