Use of PDAs To Track TB Patients More Effective Than Paper-Based Systems, Study Says

Health workers in Lima, Peru, who used personal digital assistants to track patients with drug-resistant tuberculosis reduced the average time it took for the patients' data to reach physicians from 23 days to eight days, according to a study published online in the International Journal of Infectious Diseases, The Hindu reports.

Under earlier patient tracking systems, a team of four health workers would visit more than 100 clinics and laboratories twice weekly to collect data on TB patients. The health workers would then transcribe the data by hand and send it to physicians. The process took more than three weeks per patient, according to The Hindu. In addition, there was a high possibility for errors because the data were copied by hand.

For the study, Joaquin Blaya, a graduate student at the Harvard-MIT Division of Health Sciences and Technology, designed a new system in which health workers entered data into a PDA using medical software. The health workers then transferred the data from the PDAs to their computers and sent it to physicians. The new system reduced the average time it took for the data to reach physicians from 23 days to eight days and eliminated a few cases in which data were misplaced or lost. According to the researchers, timely and accurate lab results are "essential" for physicians to "determine if a patient is responding to treatment and, if not, to alert physicians to the possible need for medication changes." In addition, the researchers noted that the PDA system was more cost-effective than the paper-based system. The program began in two of Lima's districts and has been expanded to all five districts, The Hindu reports (The Hindu, 2/16).

An abstract of the study is available online.