[Editors] MIT: Monitoring TB patients the high-tech way

[Jen Hirsch]

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MIT project uses personal digital assistants to track TB data
--Test results reach doctors an average of 15 days faster
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For Immediate Release
TUESDAY, FEB. 10, 2009

Contact: Jen Hirsch, MIT News Office
E: jfhirsch at mit.edu, T: 617-253-1682


CAMBRIDGE, Mass. -- For patients who have drug-resistant forms of  
tuberculosis, it’s critical to monitor the disease as closely as  
possible. That means monthly testing throughout a two-year course of  
powerful antibiotics, with injections six days a week for the first  
six months.

Keeping track of all those test results can be very time-consuming,  
especially in developing countries where health workers rely on paper  
copies. That’s why MIT graduate student Joaquin Blaya decided to try  
out a new tracking method:  personal digital assistants.

In a project launched in Lima, Peru, the researchers found that  
equipping health care workers with PDAs to record data dropped the  
average time for patients’ test results to reach their doctors from 23  
days to eight days.

“You can monitor patients in a more timely way. It also prevents  
results from getting lost,” says Blaya, a PhD student in the Harvard- 
MIT Division of Health Sciences and Technology (HST).

Their work was reported in the online edition of the International  
Journal of Infectious Diseases.

Blaya started the project after taking a year off during his graduate  
studies to return to Chile, where he was born.

“I went back to Chile and realized … the key was to focus on the  
population I wanted to help,” he says. “Instead of saying, ‘I’m a  
mechanical engineer, what kind of device can I build,’ I should be  
saying ‘Who are the people working in the settings I want to work in?’”

When Blaya returned to MIT, he took lecturer Amy Smith’s D-Lab course  
and got connected with Partners in Health, a nonprofit whose mission  
is to promote health care in resource-poor areas.

Working with faculty members from HST and the Brigham and Women’s  
Hospital, Blaya launched the PDA project in Lima. He also worked  
closely with the Peruvian sister organization of Partners in Health,  
Socios en Salud. “The way to solve healthcare problems is by involving  
the community,” he says.

Under the old patient tracking system, a team of four healthcare  
workers would visit more than 100 health care centers and labs twice a  
week to record patient test results on paper sheets. A couple of times  
a week, they returned to their main office to transcribe those results  
onto two sets of forms per patient — one for the doctors and one for  
the health care administrators.

 From start to finish, that process took an average of more than three  
weeks per patient. In some extreme cases, results were temporarily  
misplaced and could take up to three months to be recorded. There was  
also greater potential for error because information was copied by  
hand so many times.

With the new system, health care workers enter all of the lab data  
into their handheld devices, using medical software designed for this  
purpose. When the workers return to their office, they sync up the  
PDAs with their computers.

“The doctors get what they want, the administrators get what they  
want, and the team only has to enter the data once,” says Blaya.

The new system dramatically dropped the average time to record results  
to eight days, and eliminated the few cases where results went missing  
for several weeks or months. “You can really prevent patients from  
falling through the cracks,” says Blaya.

Getting timely and accurate lab results “is essential to determine if  
a patient is responding to treatment and, if not, to alert physicians  
to the possible need for medication changes,” the researchers wrote.

Peruvian health care workers enthusiastically embraced the program,  
which started in two of Lima’s districts and has now been expanded to  
all five. In addition to saving time, the handheld devices are also  
more cost-effective than the paper-based system, the researchers  
reported recently in the International Journal of Tuberculosis and  
Lung Disease.

Other authors of the International Journal of Infectious Diseases  
paper are Ted Cohen, assistant professor at Harvard Medical School;  
Pablo Rodriguez, engineer at Socios en Salud; Jihoon Kim, statistician  
at the Brigham and Women’s Hospital; and Hamish Fraser, assistant  
professor at Harvard Medical School.

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Written by Anne Trafton, MIT News Office
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