Dr. Vanessa Kerry, the 35-year-old Massachusetts General Hospital physician and daughter of Senator John Kerry, aims to improve health care, both in developing nations and in the U.S. Her new nonprofit, tentatively called the Global Health Service Partnership, will send doctors and nurses to work in developing countries and in return help pay off their hefty student loans.

The goal of the program, which is partnered with the Peace Corps, is to aid countries with severe shortages of health professionals. But, as NPR reported, Kerry thinks the program will also help bolster health care in America by broadening doctors’ worldviews and teaching them to make the most of the resources they have available. “There’s evidence people come back with better clinical skills, better appreciation of needs, more likely to work in underserved specialties,” Kerry told NPR’s Shots blog.

Kerry partnered with the Peace Corps both for its name recognition and its institutional knowledge — it’s been sending workers abroad “in a sensitive, integrated way,” Kerry said, for 50 years. The Global Health Service Partnership will serve to fill a hole left by the Peace Corps, which doesn’t deploy doctors or nurses: volunteers in Kerry’s program will not only offer medical care but also teach and mentor local health care workers.

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WASHINGTON – The Peace Corps plans to acquire a comprehensive electronic health records system to serve its volunteers stationed in 77 developing countries. The agency wants to develop a proof of concept electronic health record (EHR) and test it in a limited pilot by September and deploy it in fiscal 2013.

Many of the developing regions where volunteers work, primarily in Africa and the Asia Pacific, have low bandwidth and big delays in processing network data because it is difficult to acquire affordable Internet connectivity, according to a recent request for information announcement in Federal Business Opportunities.

“An overall solution must work for all posts, not just the well-connected ones,” the agency said.

Peace Corps staff in country will use a laptop or mobile device to record basic medical information and synchronize it to OpenEMR, a free and open source application that will be used in post countries for practice management and be customized to meet requirements. It is also certified by the Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT to meet meaningful

Among the comprehensive EHR’s functions, the system should supply searchable problem, medication and allergies lists and a record of vaccinations. The EHR will allow for the electronic transfer of information from a pre-service medical screening system.

The EHR system will also provide a billing module for exporting to a claims database a “super bill,” which will include healthcare provider, cost and other information in standard codes to enable an audit trail to track specific expenses, medical costs for specific conditions and medical budgeting from the bottom up.

A clinical notes section will also enable the provider to enter free-form narrative entry for each patient visit. And the system will feature a lab and imaging section and a consultation section, for which results can be scanned and pasted into the record.

The Peace Corps has other related systems underway to better recruit, place and support its volunteers around the world, including a volunteer lifecycle management system and volunteer electronic health system.