A mobile health approach to tuberculosis contact tracing in resource-limited settings.

Tuberculosis remains a leading cause of morbidity and mortality worldwide In 2011 there were 8 7 million new cases and 1 4 million deaths from the disease with Andgt 95 of these deaths taking place in low and middle income countries 1 Contact tracing prevents the spread of tuberculosis by identifying and screening a case s contacts and referring symptomatic individuals to health care providers Traditionally contact tracing has been conducted with paper forms which can lead to considerable inefficiencies in data collection storage and retrieval These inefficiencies are problematic as tuberculosis can continue to spread if disruption of disease transmission is delayed Mobile health approaches to tuberculosis contact tracing remain largely unaddressed and limited to management and monitoring of multidrug resistant tuberculosis 2 To address these limitations a mobile health application that digitizes and automates contact tracing was developed This poster presents work currently underway to evaluate this new approach in Botswana which has the tenth highest incidence rate of tuberculosis in the world 3 Operational considerations for implementing a mobile health approach to contact tracing in resource limited settings are also presented

Keywords

At risk for a particular disease or infection, Facility-based health worker, Delayed reporting of events, Access to information or data, Pilot, Feasibility, Tuberculosis, Disease management, Surveillance, Installed application