Pendragon Forms Case Study: Interplast

Mobile Databases for Worldwide Humanitarian Reconstructive Surgery

Interplast is an international humanitarian organization that provides free reconstructive surgery in developing countries.  Each year volunteer surgery teams make about 25 two-week trips to places such as Sri Lanka, Vietnam, Myanmar and Zambia.   Interplast is able to make a direct and profound difference in the lives of 3,000 children with a congenital deformity or injury each year. 

Since 2001, Interplast has used Pendragon Forms software on PDAs (personal data assistants) to build an electronic database for patient records that can be used for surgies in some of the most remote and least developed areas of the world.  This mobile database is key to Interplast’s patient care improvement project.  Pendragon Forms is used on new Palm Zire 72 PDAs donated by Palm, Inc.  

Using PDA databases database allows Interplast surgery team members to efficiently create and update records.  During each two week trip, surgeons see 80-120 cases and about 3000 patients each each year.  Handheld forms are also used to monitor quality assurance and improvement through tracking specific data points.  When traveling around the world, affordable, lightweight PDAs are ideal computing platforms. 

Dr. Richard Gillerman, Interplast board member and anesthesiologist who launched the patient care improvement project, is excited about the new Pendragon Forms’ photo capture capabilities. 

"The photos would be used to create surgical reference databases. These surgical databases with photos could be used to educate volunteers and medical practitioners around the world and help achieve Interplast's mission to empower local communities so that medical access continues year-round,” said Gillerman.

To learn more about the Interplast mission, please visit http://www.interplast.org/

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