Peace Corps Ships Medicine To Volunteers Faster With Medlink, Powered By Twilio SMS

Peace Corps Ships Medicine To Volunteers Faster With Medlink, Powered By Twilio SMS

The Peace Corps takes President John F Kennedy’s challenge, “dare to be great” seriously. The challenge does not come with any qualifications like “dare to be great, where WiFi allows.” They work in remote areas without reliable access to technology we take for granted like WiFi, smartphones and in some cases, electricity. Despite the challenges, the Peace Corps doesn’t stop improving or iterating. Recently, the Peace Corps launched Medlink to get much needed medical supplies to volunteers around the world using Twilio SMS.

Peace Corps volunteers in remote areas have limited access to over the counter, run of the mill medical supplies you can get at any pharmacy: cotton swabs, band-aids, Ibuprofen, etc. When volunteers run out of much needed supplies they email, call or send texts to the Medical Staff at Peace Corps HQ. Peace Corps medical staff were spending up to eight hours every week, responding to, organizing and fulfilling requests. The team knew that there had to be a better way to get supplies out faster, and reduce the time staff spent dealing with requests.

The Peace Corps had, as Andrea Roberts from the Office of Health Services put it, “a minimal budget.” Patrick Choquette, Director of Innovation at the Peace Corps said their budget was “zero” and they needed to ship a solution as soon as humanly possible. Relying on the ingenuity and generosity of developers, the Peace Corps enlisted the help of James Dabbs, Lead Developer for Medlink, at the National Day of Civic Hacking.

James built out Medlink’s functionality so that any volunteer can send an SMS to a Twilio powered number to request medical supplies. The Medical Staff can then fulfill the request through a simple web form that integrates with the Twilio API so when a volunteer’s order is filled, they’ll get a text confirmation.

“This is important to the Peace Corps. We can’t just say we’re going to serve in places where there’s WiFi or Internet. We need to be serving at the end of the road for the people that actually need it. That’s what the Peace Corps is about,” said Choquette. Using Twilio SMS, the Peace Corps can reach the end of the road and communicate with volunteers whether they have smart phones or feature phones, and regardless of what side of the world they’re on.

While Medlink is a fantastic ship for  the Peace Corps, they’re not done yet. Choquette sees the strength of the developer community as an essential asset to opening up government processes, iterating them, and making the world a better place. “There are a ton of people who want to help, we just need to make it easier for them to do so.”

You can help the Peace Corps by plugging into their mission on GitHub here:  https://github.com/PeaceCorps and learn more about the White House’s involvement here.