Last year a woman in her late 20s was on mile 700 while hiking the Pacific Crest Trail when she developed a mysterious pain in her abdomen.
She hiked to the nearest country store and with one bar of service on her smartphone called up the Global Outdoor Emergency Support (GOES).health app to speak with a doctor.
The doctor suggested she either had severe kidney stones or a ruptured ovarian cyst. The doctor also gave her the location of the nearest medical facility and instructions to give to the healthcare worker.
She went back to the trail, and the pain became excruciating as she tried to camp.
Because of the conversation she had with the doctor, when she woke up the other hikers to ask for help, she knew what to tell them she needed.
She found a medical facility and it turned out the doctor was correct — she needed to flush kidney stones.
“Just having that peace of mind is a game-changer,” said Camilo Barcenas, founding CEO at GOES.health. The GOES.health app won an Outdoor Retailer Innovation Award at the 2023 Outdoor Retailer Snow Show.
A doctor in your pocket
The basic version of the app costs $1.99 a month for interactive health assessment tools, and $14.99 a month for the premium version, which offers 24/7 live support from wilderness medicine physicians, plus offline resources.
The app has more than 7,500 global users so far, without any sales or marketing, Barcenas said.
According to Barcenas, the mobile outdoor health platform is staffed by the world’s foremost wilderness medicine experts.
The app can provide users with information about what to expect on a wilderness trip, including potential dangers from weather, terrain or wildlife, as well as helping with health problems as they arise.
The company has been joining with hiking and mountain climbing organizations in the United States who want to add the service for their members. In particular, through-hiking clubs and associations are expressing interest.
GOES was also stress tested at the Grand Canyon, where park rangers suggested GOES simplify the chatbot to speak at a fifth-grade level. Now the company is working with six national parks and hopes to put QR codes for the app at trailheads.
The next foray will be to partner with outdoor brands to sell memberships to the app along with other products and services.
Barcenas would like to see the app become the equivalent of the satellite service used in automobiles, OnStar.
How it started
The idea for the app came from Barcenas’ background in setting up technology for hospitals. In one instance, he started a software company that collaborated with the Mayo Clinic.
“I thought to myself that everyone has a supercomputer in their pocket, and that healthcare is just not getting there,” he said. “It’s broken, because of systemic inertia … I want to create the future for people to take care of themselves.”
He then met the man who would go on to co-found the company, Dr. Grant Lipman, a clinical professor of emergency medicine at the Stanford University School of Medicine.
The Stanford School of Medicine had already created wilderness medicine as a sub-specialty within emergency medicine in the 1980s, and Lipman was a fellow in the program.
During their conversation, Lipman expressed to Barcenas a need to connect people with wilderness medicine experts.
“What we fundamentally want to do is enable people to connect with nature,” Barcenas said. “By giving that peace of mind that comes from the fact that now on your phone, if something happens, there’s something you can do about it.”
For research, the GOES team spent six months interviewing people around the world in Japan, Indonesia, the Middle East, western Europe, Africa and the Americas to understand how they prepare for trips, what happens on those trips and how they behave in an emergency.
They found that people are most excited before they go on their adventures, but they tend not to research much beyond what the weather is going to do. They need access to information in real-time.
Now that people have become more familiar with using technology such as chatbots, GOES incorporates wilderness medicine and evidenced-based decision-making to help people work through issues on the trail.
Much of the information is taken from the more than 10 books that Dr. Lipman has written.
For example, if a user gets a wound, a burn or an insect bite, the app will walk them through what to do. It also will locate the person on the map, so a doctor on the other line will know where the user is located.
This is particularly useful for people who are leery of calling a hospital or 911 and incurring huge medical bills, according to Barcenas.
“Personally, I believe that everyone should have GOES in their pocket for whatever happens,” Barcenas said. “We all deserve the freedom to be educated when we go outdoors and … know what to do, and not be beholden to the health care disaster world.”
Bart Schaneman can be reached at bart@ordaily.outdoorretailer.com.
