First OSCAR installation in Jamaica!

OSCAR Deployed in Free Health Clinic in Jamaica

6 Feb 2014

Oscar is used in many locations and clinics in Canada. I am pleased to report to the OSCAR community that to the best of my knowledge, the first install of OSCAR in Jamaica occurred in late January, 2014.

The Lions Club of North St. Catherine provide a monthly free health clinic in the community of Bogwalk that focuses on three diseases. High Blood Pressure, Diabetes and Glaucoma. This is far from any tourist resorts or beaches and the first Saturday of each month a local GP and five nurses work along with other Lions members to provide free care to those who cannot afford such care. Each year Canadian Vision Care (CVC) partners with these Lions to provide a free eye-care clinic.

To facilitate proper tele-medicine consults with CVC Optometrists and Ophthalmologists, a Linux server with Oscar12 and a router were donated to the club by CVC. The roll out was very successful, all 156 glaucoma patients seen over two days were entered into OSCAR and all 41 who were to get Rx glasses from Canada were also entered by the Lions working as scribes for the CVC team. We did not register the other 300 patients seen over the two days as they were either given reading glasses on the spot OR medications for itchy eyes or various conditions that will not be followed up with by the Lions clinic.

The version of OSCAR used is customized to allow more rapid entry of the many fields specific to eye-care. These innovative screens are available for all to see and we hope ultimately the idea of using a graphical image to input “detailed data” and single click fields is adopted by many more in the OSCAR community.

Thanks to all who helped in launching this project, our next step is to mirror the database with one on a Canadian cloud to allow easy access by CVC members as the Lions Den has not internet so when set up for the clinic, they actually have a secure intranet. Then one of the Lions takes the small server home and hooks it up to the intranet to update the back-up server in the cloud.

It has taken a few years and over a dozen volunteers but again we can say; NONE OF US ARE AS SMART AS ALL OF US. More features will be added as CVC continues to advance OSCAR4Eyes.

Gerry Leinweber