Personal digital assistants to collect tuberculosis bacteriology data in Peru reduce delays, errors, and workload, and are acceptable to users: cluster randomized controlled trial.
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Date
2009-04-24
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Abstract
OBJECTIVES To evaluate the effectiveness of a personal digital assistant PDA based system for collecting tuberculosis test results and to compare this new system to the previous paper based system The PDA and paper based systems were evaluated based on processing times frequency of errors and number of work hours expended by data collectors METHODS We conducted a cluster randomized controlled trial in 93 health establishments in Peru Baseline data were collected for 19 months Districts n 4 were then randomly assigned to intervention PDA or control paper groups and further data were collected for 6 months Comparisons were made between intervention and control districts and within districts before and after the introduction of the intervention RESULTS The PDA based system had a significant effect on processing times pUnder0 001 and errors p 0 005 In the between districts comparison the median processing time for cultures was reduced from 23 to 8 days and for smears was reduced from 25 to 12 days In that comparison the proportion of cultures with delays 90 days was reduced from 9 2 to 0 1 and the number of errors was decreased by 57 1 The intervention reduced the work hours necessary to process results by 70 and was preferred by all users CONCLUSIONS A well designed PDA based system to collect data from institutions over a large resource poor area can significantly reduce delays errors and person hours spent processing data
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Keywords
At risk for a particular disease or infection, Facility-based health worker, Delayed reporting of events, Quality/unreliability of data, Effectiveness, Experimental, Randomized, Tuberculosis, Disease management, Data collection and reporting, Registries/vital events tracking