- a blog about the two hurricanes hitting Nicaragua in two weeks, climate change and why going green is important.
- a blog about how typing data electronically makes for less mistakes and more time for patient care.
- and today, a blog about HOW we are able to do this now and how appreciative we are.
We are grateful this Thanksgiving Day for the Hikma Health organization, whose philosophy is "Smart Care, Everywhere". They found our website and asked if we were interested in having an electronic patient record-keeping system for the Clinic…duh!
Through the last eight years, we have been exploring many ways to do this, but we just did not have the expertise to implement this idea of moving from paper to digital. We finally started having internet in the clinic in 2018, thanks to Philip and Lydia, who came to volunteer from London.
Hikma Health volunteer staff have been working with Sarah who works with Ligia, our dental hygienist. Ligia also understands computers and has had more available time away from dentistry for this project, because she is pregnant; she needs to be extra careful about exposure to COVID-19, and so has not been working in our dental clinic. Thanks to the two of them, information collected from clinic administrator Josefa and from me has been interpreted into understandable data language and passed onto to the coders at Hikma Health who are custom-designing an electronic record-keeping system specifically designed for the Nueva Vida Clinic! This work will ensure that we have what WE need and not what a clinic in Kenya, for example, might need.
For this online software program to work, we need tablets and smart phones. Thanks to Hikma Health donations we have already received some which they managed to ship through Peaceworks (NJ) and Quest for Peace (CT)…to whom we are also most grateful.
We are extremely grateful to Hikma Health for all their hard work at:
- custom-designed coding,
- working with lay folks and older folks to develop the best program for us,
- seeking grants to allow us to use their services free of charge for six months,
- and donating tablets and phones.
What a gift sent to us from The Divine to our clinic! That they choose to do this work and that they found us is a wonder.
And amidst all the needs of the world with hurricanes, fires, droughts, floods, economic loss with COVID-19, we are deeply, deeply grateful that many of you would choose to help us in this endeavor. It will save us money in the long term and help us limit our effect on climate change.
Thank you because together and ONLY together can we solve problems.
-Kathleen
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