Lori Most

Founder and CEO, BackpackEMR

Supernova Award Category: 

Tech Optimization and Modernization

The Organization: 

BackpackEMR was born in 2014 after a trip to Peru gave the company’s founder insight into the medical experience of rural communities. To increase efficiency, cut costs, and streamline operations while improving patient care, BackpackEMR provides mobile clinics with critical technology that’s missing from most standard patient-tracking solutions.

BackpackEMR ensures that you can trust that your patient tracking tools will ‘just work’ when they are turned on. BackpackEMR focuses on app stability and reliability as its main objectives.

The BackpackEMR system seamlessly manages up to 20 devices and transfers up to 60,000 documents within seconds. To date, BackpackEMR has helped provide healthcare to 50,000 patients across 19 countries.

The Problem: 

First and foremost, rural clinics have limited or no access to internet. These clinics often have to use paper medical records due to limited or unreliable electricity and internet availability. Another challenge is that mobile clinics have to store paper records at a fixed remote location, which mean they weren’t available on-site for future follow-up care. Using paper charts and records is time-intensive, decreasing the number of patients that can be seen in a day.

The Solution: 

BackpackEMR needed a solution to ensure that it’s app remained stable and reliable, so that it’s patient tracking tools will ‘just work’ when they are turned on. After assessing numerous competitive options, BackpackEMR turned to Couchbase Mobile to store and process data natively on mobile devices. BackpackEMR selected Couchbase because it delivers performance at scale, deployment flexibility and maintain security for data.

The Results: 

After selecting Couchbase, BackpackEMR has increased efficiency, cuts costs, and streamlined operations while improving patient outcomes with critical technology that’s missing from most standard patient-tracking solutions. The ability to deploy Couchbase on Amazon Web Services quickly and easily has provided BackpackEMR with the reliability, scalability, security, and global availability they require to manage data for all their customers and patients. And when internet access is available, all patient records sync to the cloud, enabling clinics to access the data for future care.

Metrics: 

The BackpackEMR system seamlessly manages up to 20 devices and transfers up to 60,000 documents within seconds.  

To date, BackpackEMR has helped provide healthcare to 50,000 patients across 20 countries. 

The offline-first, peer-to-peer networking capabilities provided by Couchbase have created a seamless patient experience without access to electricity or the internet, and cuts charting costs by 20% compared to paper. 

BackpackEMR’s SaaS has reduced manual processes by 25% and increased the number of patients seen by 30%.

The Technology: 

Due to the challenges Backpack EMR was facing, the company needed a reliable solution that would enable patient data to be shared across the clinic seamlessly in real-time, so they selected to Couchbase Mobile. The NoSQL solution was selected to include Couchbase’s leading-edge Customer 360 and Field Service solutions to help deliver a single view of data with one platform and improve productivity for remote employees.

Disruptive Factor: 

The biggest challenge in building a digital system for pop-up clinics in remote locations is that medical teams do not have access to the internet or electricity during clinics. This removes the ability to rely on a cloud server or a client-server model. With our offline, server-less, data-sharing network, medical teams can now operate a full pop-up clinic anywhere, including a large field, under a group of trees, or outside a school. No complex infrastructure is needed.

Shining Moment: 

BackpackEMR is ultra stable and reliable in the field, with no data loss, accurate data integrity, and lightening fast data transfers. Despite the complexity of our offline syncing, our app just "always works."

About BackpackEMR

At Couchbase, we believe data is at the heart of the enterprise. We empower developers and architects to build, deploy, and run their most mission-critical applications. Couchbase delivers a high-performance, flexible and scalable modern database that runs across the data center and any cloud. Many of the world’s largest enterprises rely on Couchbase to power their core applications.