Operation Blessing is a non-profit organization that teams with volunteers to help victims of natural disasters performing various humanitarian tasks. Medical professionals from Mayo Clinic in Rochester, MN, (organized by Operation Blessing), has been providing life-saving medical care to countries that cannot afford to pay for such services. PlanetJ was consulted to provide a quick, inexpensive and intuitive web application to help in their mission; of providing Haitian hospitals the benefit of a web based medication supply and inventory application.
The earthquake in Haiti devastated many villages throughout the country. While many people died, there continues to be numerous impoverished sick children and adults seeking treatment, and supplies are quite limited. Volunteer pharmacists, nurses, and physicians have been donating time and medicine to help three hospitals in Haiti, but they lacked a simple way for them to request medications and manage existing inventory.
It was necessary to have the application easy to use and bilingual to serve the Haitian hospital staff as they currently do not use many computer technologies
PlanetJ, using the WOW product, developed an online web application in about a week that allows administrators the ability to add, edit and delete inventory items; remove inventory quantities; view drug requests by hospital and/or status; provide ability for hospitals to view order request status administration to process drug requests from hospitals. All this needed to have secure access to both administration and hospital staff.
During training, the Haitians caught on very quickly largely due to the multi-language (English and Creole) support that WOW provided. They needed something very simple to train and use. WOW applications fit this bill perfectly.
There were a total of three applications built to solve their request; Administration, Central Pharmacy, and Hospital Request. Each will be described more in-depth below.
Application: Administration
Overview: Once logged on to the system, a medication administrator can see all drugs listed, doses, route of delivery, status, category, expiration date and quantity available.
From a drop down list on the Admin home page, a user can easily enter in new medications. This application is displayed in English and Creole.
Administrators can see which hospital is requesting which products, how many, quantities on hand and other miscellaneous requests.
Further search can be done on status "open requests.
Application: Central Pharmacy
Overview: The Central Pharmacy users work on medication delivery to the three different major Haitian hospitals. From the sign-in below, a user can manage medications by clicking on the edit icon on the left, apply changes in quantity, expiration date, dose and delivery method
As with the Admin application, new medications can be entered as well.
Medication managers can monitor which hospitals have open requests, approve or disprove quantities within their requests, and change status to "open, approved, or denied"
Workers in the Central Pharmacy can also view open requests via text or chart.
Application: Pharmacy Requests
Overview: The Pharmacy Requests application allows the three individual hospitals to sign-in with a secure user name and password.
Once the hospital user signs on, they are brought to the Requests screen. The user can then begin requesting medication by clicking on the blue hyperlink on the right.
Once the user clicks the hyperlink to Request the Drug, the user is brought to a request page where they can fill out the quantity of medicine they require as well as any comments they may have for the Pharmacist. They cannot change dose, product or requesting hospital.
Also, the hospitals can request to see any previous requests they have made and status of those requests by utilizing a separate operation.
Operation Blessing staff anticipated training issues. The people residing in Haiti have limited computer skills. A volunteer software engineer from Mayo Clinic, Tyler Holm, assisted the Haitian staff with training. He also provided management on-the-fly changes to the programs. He had this to say:
"True story. For one user it took 15 minutes for her to learn to simply double click on a desktop shortcut that launched WOW. After she opened WOW we trained her on the application for maybe 15 minutes where after that time she was using WOW without guidance. Took her less time to learn WOW, than figuring out how to double click on a desktop shortcut.
The customizability of WOW really shinned through for the Haitian people and it also raised some brows in management. Making real-time changes to the application made two huge impressions. We were able to quickly tweak the application to make things simpler for the Haitian users. This was extremely useful because many of the users had little or no experience on a computer. Also, volunteers were super impressed with the ability of WOW to help take a Haitian dream and make it a reality in 3 weeks. Continued tweaks and customizations happening overnight instead of months have been verbally applauded on many occasions."
PLANETJ CORPORATION
