GAINESVILLE, Fla. (WCJB) – Happy Tech Tuesday. I’m Melanie Moron here with UF Innovate, and today I am joined by Dr. Eric Nelson with Emerging Pathogens Institute. Dr. Nelson, thanks so much for joining us today.
Thanks for having me.
So explain to us, what is EPI?
So, EPI stands for Emerging Pathogens Institute. It’s a research institution that discovers new pathways to better respond to large-scale outbreaks. We do that here in the state of Florida. We do that nationally and internationally.
And what is MotoMeds?
So MotoMeds is a nighttime pediatric telemedicine and medication delivery service. The idea is that we want to provide families early access to information by phone, and then when they need medication in hand, we can deliver those medications to them in a timely fashion to avoid the conversion from pre-emergency to emergency.
And what technology is EPI using to make MotoMeds work?
We use technology for dispatch made by a company called Trek Medics. And then we’re also developing our own software that’s clinical decision support software to help our nurses at our call centers adhere to guidelines, shorten their call durations, and then get the dispatches done quickly so that children can have that early access to care before they would transition to an emergency. Now, we do this in some of the most difficult places in the world. In this case it’s in Haiti, which is a conflict zone. We work at night in the mountains where there’s no electricity, no roads, no address systems, and we use pools of local drivers to navigate that terrain to get that care delivered. And what is the relationship between EPI and MotoMeds here in Gainesville?
The technologies, workflows, clinical guidelines that we’re building in Haiti actually have relevance back to the States, because you could imagine that if you have a child at 2:00 in the morning tonight who falls sick, you have two options: seek care at the emergency room or wait until the morning, try to find an urgent care appointment, miss work, and have that 12-hour gap where your child might not have care. So the same need that’s in Haiti is here, and the technologies we built could be applied here in the US
Well, Dr. Nelson, thanks so much for joining us today. And that’s it for today’s Tech Tuesday episode. We’ll see you next week.
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