Development In Developing Countries: Trek Medics Builds Avenues For Health Care with Twilio

Development In Developing Countries: Trek Medics Builds Avenues For Health Care with Twilio

What if 911 wasn’t an option for you? It’s a terrifying thought knowing that in a moment of need, there would be no ambulances blaring, no EMTs piling into trucks, and no emergency helicopter coming. That’s a reality for people in developing countries. It’s a reality that the folks at Trek Medics are working to change. But changing that requires confronting a few unfortunate truths. Here are two:

1. Expensive, old school hardware makes it extremely hard to launch emergency response systems in developing countries who don’t have the resources or budget of Western countries. The vendors not only tailor their solutions to Western infrastructure, their technology is predicated on the assumption you have Western infrastructure.
2. Without reliable access to healthcare and emergency services, short-term, treatable conditions deteriorate to long term disabilities.

In the face of these systemic issues, Trek Medics hit the ground running. They fly around the world to the Dominican Republic, Tanzania, Kenya, and trek all over Central America, going to those under served communities directly.

Square Peg, Round Hole

Emergency response teams in the West can build their communications systems on-top of a pre-existing communications infrastructure. This is the communications equivalent of being born on third base. It’s a short distance to home plate. For Trek Medics founder Jason Friesen and the communities Trek Medics serve, it’s a much longer sprint to home plate.

Trek Medics searched for a flexible vendor that could adapt to their non-traditional communications needs. “If it can’t be run on just a laptop and/or smartphone, we don’t want it,” said Friesen.

Friesen encountered the problem over and over again, a cultural issue as much as a technological one: traditional Western communications vendors rely on a backbone of Western infrastructure to work properly. Trek Medics can’t build that infrastructure, so vendors can’t give Trek Medics the service they need.

The vendors they chatted with all came up with same set of prerequisites that were out of the question for Trek Medics. They weren’t going follow the typical model of legacy communications by shipping, installing, managing and updating any on-premise call center hardware.

After a long search, Twilio finally provided Trek Medics the ubiquitous backbone they needed, without a catch.

Twilio boils down the hardware, phone closets, and SIP trunks that Jason’s previous vendors needed to operate, into a programmable API he can use from anywhere.

“[I]n the case of dispatching software, the vendors have been tied down by legacy technologies that’ve been designed specifically for centralized response systems, so even if they wanted to start from scratch, they can’t because Western systems just have a lot of baggage, and we’ve made a conscious effort to avoid that,” says Jason.

A critical step in this mission is finding the most reliable, lowest common denominator of communication. In most cases that denominator is SMS, a invaluable tool Trek Medics leverages using the Twilio API.

“One of our guiding values is accessibility, and the Achilles heel of emergency communications is interoperability, so we’ve committed to a lowest-common-denominator approach, and SMS is the current lingua franca of mobile communications.”

Adding a service like SMS that can coalesce emergency responders creates a whole different reality for the people Trek Medics work with.

The Power of Communicaations

“Most people take it as a given that they’re at the mercy of bystanders and strangers. this isn’t for lack of people willing to help, but more for lack of appropriate technologies,” says Friesen.

Now, Trek Medics is on pace to roll out Beacon, their SMS service, to over 200,000 people this year. Still there’s an incredible amount of work to be done, and an incredible amount people to reach.

Benjamin Gilmour, Trek Medics’ Director of Field Programs is quite literally “doing some real modern day Johnny Appleseed-type stuff,” says Jason. That’s the scrappy, determined mentality that Trek Medics is founded upon. Using Twilio, they can focus that determination on fixing emergency services, and not worry about fixing the communications hurdles that held those services back.