Four Corners Medical Record System is now available

SCOTTSDALE, Arizona -- One day in the near future, a team of physicians and nurses will travel in boats up the Amazon, to isolated villages. As they provide health care services, they use computers to record patient medical records, providing the medical histories to future visiting teams.

 

Soon after, another medical team will travel via horseback over the mountains in Guatemala to remote villages. Suspecting heart issues with some patients, they send data to specialists in NY to review, all from a mountaintop with only battery powered equipment.

 

Creating affordable technology to bring quality health care to the third world has been the dream of Rogers Hellman, founder of Charlottesville Virginia based Gnosis, LLC. Although based in Charlottesville, Rogers has traveled extensively over the last 3 years. He has been researching the needs of medical clinics in remote regions. Accurate patient records/histories was a common request, as was the ability to consult with specialists and convey the information. With this in mind Rogers put together a team to produce a portable medical records system that identifies patients using their fingerprint. In many developing countries people have no identification numbers and there can be issues such as a language barrier to getting effective treatment.

 

Not only has Gnosis built a highly portable medical records system, but the data is fed into a mapping system that can display disease patterns and trends. Rogers' vision is for most, if not all of the developing world clinics, to have these systems. The health of the individuals will be greatly enhanced by virtue of having retrievable medical histories. Giving local health care providers access to specialists anywhere in the world, improves the health services that much more.

 

Rogers' dream is manifesting now. The system is in use at 7 test sites around Guatemala. He reports that the early results of the field tests are very encouraging. “Not perfect, if everything were perfect, you would know that something was wrong. There are just enough small problems to let us know we are human, but we did a pretty good job with the design and implementation. These minor issues should be resolved in the coming weeks. Then we will work with a few more clinics, then a few more. Eventually we want to open up to the whole world”.

 

Gnosis has also developed a prototype system that takes the consolidated medical data and renders a map of the world, showing disease patterns and trends. Rogers wants to expand the prototype to include alarms system to alert authorities when conditions warrant it. This system could filter out “noise” and see patterns before humans could. Having an alarm that alerts authorities at the first occurrence of a vector borne illness, would be huge. Or identifying outbreaks at the earliest possible moment.

 

Gnosis refers to this group of projects as the Gnosis Medical Project. It is an all encompassing plan to change the way diseases are viewed and treatment is rendered. Helping them in this effort, has been the Axis Open Source Corporation. Axis provided their expertise in web application development to produce the software used at each clinic. Dr. John Horn, CEO of Axis Open Source told us: “It is sort of difficult to call customer support when deep in the Amazon or up in the Andes. We wanted the system to work correctly and be easy to use, right out of the box.”

 

We also used the biometric software and products from Atlanta based, M2SYS. Proper identification of patients was a fundamental problem that needed to be addressed. In developing countries, people do not have a social security number. Addresses are nonexistent and most people do not know their date of birth. Given that, a biometric solution such as fingerprints was the only way to do this. The products from M2Sys were easy to incorporate and use.

 

The development work for the disease mapping software was done by Ecomby. A Guatemalan software firm specializing in Open Source applications. Bryan Garcia, owner of Ecomby is happy to be a part of a project where the people of Guatemala stand to benefit.

 

About Gnosis LLC
Gnosis Medical Services seeks to improve the quality of health care in developing areas of the world by enabling health care providers in these areas to better manage medical treatment. The Four Corners Medical System provides the software necessary to manage patient record-keeping in even the most remote locations. The software is state-of-the-art and specifically engineered for use in developing countries. Gnosis is headquartered in Charlottesville, VA.

 

About Axis Open Source
Axis Open Source is an open source software consultancy that also houses a training and development center where students learn how to use open source tools like PHP, MySQL, CodeCharge, and Linux. John W. Horn PhD is the founder and CEO of Axis Open Source Corporation.

 

About M2SYS Technology
M2SYS Technology, www.m2sys.com, is a recognized industry leader in fingerprint identity-management technology, delivering a variety of customized, fully functional, turn-key fingerprint readers and software solutions for businesses and consumers. M2SYS was recently awarded the 2007

 

Frost and Sullivan Biometrics Technology Innovation of the Year Award for their unique and innovative biometrics solutions and unparalleled customer service.

 

About Enterprise Computing
Based in Guatemala City with operations in all Central America, dedicated to the development, deployment and support of IT Systems, using leading edge technologies such as Linux, Solaris, MySQL, Oracle, ArcGIS and GoogleMaps, to produce applications in the fields of GIS, OLTP. We also have a call center with experienced professionals giving technical support for Linux, MySQL and Java.