AFSOUTH tracks medical readiness in real time with MCART 2.0
The Medical Currency Application for Readiness Tracking, MCART 2.0, is turning humanitarian patient care into deployment readiness during the Lesser Antilles Medical Assistance Team (LAMAT) 2026 mission, introducing a real-time, innovative way for Commanders to track how medical missions prepare forces for future operations.
While humanitarian medical missions are an integral part of regional security cooperation that reduce strain on partner nations’ health systems, they are also uniquely effective at preparing military medical forces to deliver healthcare in future operations.
Using MCART 2.0, AFSOUTH captures every patient care activity each medic completes throughout LAMAT 2026 and counts it toward required pre-deployment tasks. This means missions like LAMAT not only result in restored eyesight, reduced pain, and restored mobility, but also medics who are certified to deploy globally in support of crisis, contingency or conflict.
LAMAT brings together U.S. Air Force active-duty, National Guard and reserve medical professionals to embed alongside host-nation providers in hospitals and clinics across the Caribbean and Latin America. While teams deliver patient care, repair medical equipment, and exchange medical knowledge, they also document their specialty-specific clinical experience daily through MCART 2.0.
The application allows providers to document patient encounters and procedures at the point of care, giving commanders near real-time visibility into clinical and readiness activities across geographically separated teams and locations.
“Prior to MCART 2.0, much of the clinical work performed during missions was captured only in retrospective reports or spreadsheets,” said Col. Justin Fox, the system’s architect. “That meant we lacked a reliable way to quantify the experience our medics were gaining in the field.”
During LAMAT 2026, the platform records activities including patient encounters by specialty, procedures performed, clinical hours, training events with partner-nation providers, and equipment repaired by biomedical equipment technicians.
Those entries are monitored by the mission’s assessment, monitoring, and evaluation lead, or ‘champion’, to ensure reporting remains accurate across distributed medical teams.
Air Force Reserve Maj. Anne Villaruz, with the 349th Medical Squadron oversaw readiness and clinical reporting during LAMAT 2026 in Saint Kitts and Nevis. She described her role as the MCART 2.0 champion as an essential component to understanding the broader impacts made during the mission.
“Our role is to ensure the data coming in from the teams is accurate, complete and submitted on time so leadership has a clear understanding of what’s happening across the mission,” Villaruz said. “It provides real-time visibility into what the teams are doing across hospitals and clinics. That transparency reinforces accountability and ensures the work being done in the field is captured as part of the larger readiness picture.”
For Reserve medical personnel, the system provides an additional benefit.
“MCART makes it easy to log care right at the point of treatment, so you’re not just documenting what you did—you’re seeing it count toward your readiness in real time,” said Maj. Jason Gumm, MCART champion in Guyana. “With MCART, we’re watching it translate directly into readiness—it’s immediate, and it shows exactly what we’re delivering.”
Reservists often maintain clinical skills in civilian healthcare systems and may mobilize on short notice. Capturing their clinical experience during missions ensures those skills are documented and credited toward readiness requirements.
“Without a reliable system, highly relevant procedures and patient care activities may not be credited toward readiness requirements,” Fox said. “MCART 2.0 ensures that work performed during missions is aligned to readiness tasks and immediately visible to leadership.”
The cloud-based platform was designed to support dispersed teams operating across multiple facilities and partner nations, even in low-connectivity environments.
At the end of each mission phase, the AFSOUTH Command Surgeon provides supporting commanders with a comprehensive report detailing the readiness tasks their members completed. The platform gives commanders a clearer picture of how health security cooperation missions contribute to operational readiness.
AFSOUTH began fielding the modernized system during the 2025 global health engagement cycle, piloting it during earlier LAMAT missions and refining it during Amistad 2025. A joint proof of concept in Panama allowed
U.S. Army and Air Force medical and dental teams to log and report their service-specific readiness activities together.
For AFSOUTH leaders, that capability reflects a broader shift in how health security cooperation missions are viewed.
“Missions like LAMAT and Amistad are medical readiness missions,” said Col. Brian Gavitt, AFSOUTH Command Surgeon. “They give medics the opportunity to practice their craft in unfamiliar and resource-limited environments, facing conditions and diseases we don’t routinely see, which is the most effective way, by far, to prepare our teams for their expeditionary mission.”
As LAMAT 2026 continues, MCART 2.0 will continue capturing readiness generated through patient care, procedures and collaboration with host-nation providers.
By linking humanitarian care directly to readiness, AFSOUTH leaders are confident the MCART 2.0 platform ensures health security cooperation missions strengthen both international partnerships and the preparedness of U.S. medical forces.
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