International Health: Transmitting a live spreadsheet without internet

stonecrow9 · Jul 17, 2018

Hello all,

I am a medical student and am part of the leadership of a service project that travels abroad to offer medical services. We currently have a paper based system to communicate diagnosis and prescriptions to the "pharmacy" we set up, which is perhaps 50 feet away. However, patients often leave with the papers, or the papers are lost. This is a problem since we use the data to improve our services as well as apply for funding. We would like to switch to an electronic system, but the sites don't have internet. Is there a way to wirelessly transmit a spreadsheet from the medical teams' computers to the pharmacists? Ideally, this would be similar to a Google spreadsheet where everyone can edit it simultaneously. Using wires would be an issue since people might trip, and laying the wires each day would take time away from treating patients.

Any help would be greatly appreciated!

Math Geek · Jul 17, 2018

a simple wireless router would do the trick. you won't have internet access but a local network with a shared folder for the files would be simple enough to set-up.

i'm not sure how the spreadsheet would be shared though. not sure how to go about setting it up so everyone can edit it as they go across the various sites. i'd have to look into that one. google docs and such won't work since you won't have any net access to get to them. i'm sure there is some built in way to do it, i have just never had to set it up.

to me an easy way would be to have each patient in a separate document. this way it can be edited at each station and then saved before the patient gets to the next station. then that person can open their file and add to it and so on. this way you don't need a "live" document and whatever headaches that brings to the table. just a folder full of the individual patient files/documents to be edited and resaved at will.

Solandri · Jul 17, 2018

stonecrow9 :

It is not that simple. Normally, files are locked so only a single person can edit it at a time. If you allow multiple people to edit simultaneously, you can encounter a concurrency problem when two people edit the same part of the file at the same time. Which person's edit is correct?

When that happens, multi-user software is designed to show the second person both people's edits, and ask them which version to keep. Depending on what you're doing, you may not want that. You may want the higher ranked person's edits to override. Or you may want the dispute to be kicked over to another person whose job is to figure out which edit to keep.

So you won't be able to just use a single spreadsheet that everyone shares (if you do, only one person will be able to edit it at a time). You'll need to set up some type of database, with each station acting as a client. Whereas a shared spreadsheet fails if more than one person tries to edit the spreadsheet at the same time, a shared database only fails if more than one person tries to edit the same field at the same time. And it'll have built-in error resolution functions for if/when that happens.

OTOH if only one station is editing, while the others just need to read, then it's generally not a problem. The main difficulty is forcing the read-only clients to refresh whenever the editor saves a new copy of the file.

jsmithepa · Jul 17, 2018

With that distance, Site-to-Site WIFI.

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International Health: Transmitting a live spreadsheet without internet

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