Project Title: Health Telematics for Improving TB and HIV-Care in rural Tanzania
Project Description: Health Telematics for improving TB and HIV-Care in rural Tanzania is a project which aims to provide access of rural and remote populations in Tanzania to state of the art diagnostics and treatment services in major infectious disease to which they frequently do not have access to, and to train Tanzanian healthcare staff in implementing and maintaning health telematics infrastucture. Additionally, the project aims to develop a fully documented open-source health telematics platform with demostrated... Health Telematics for improving TB and HIV-Care in rural Tanzania is a project which aims to provide access of rural and remote populations in Tanzania to state of the art diagnostics and treatment services in major infectious disease to which they frequently do not have access to, and to train Tanzanian healthcare staff in implementing and maintaning health telematics infrastucture. Additionally, the project aims to develop a fully documented open-source health telematics platform with demostrated proof of concept for healthcare in rural Africa which can be used by anyone and anywhere beyond the lifetime in this project at no cost for software. Diagnostic and medical services in rural arears in Africa typically suffer from high rate of non-presentantion of patients, a high drop out rate after a diagnosis has been made and high rates of loss to follow up during treatment; this applies in particular to diseases like HIV-infection/AIDS or TB which require a diagnosis with modern and molecular methods and continuous patient follow up guided by results from modern diagnostic tests. The central medical objective of the object is therefore to bridge this gap between rural populations and centralized diagnostic and medical services by implementing a health Telematics Infrastructure (HTI) covering all procedures related to establishing a diagnosis and monitoring treatment and follow up and applying the principle of moving samples instead of patients. In particular, the HTI will allow to detect cases in remote places using a case definition supported by a mobile phone app, track sample shipment to a test, feedback results to the remote setting and monitor treatment progress electronically. Following the application of HTI for infectious diseases, the principle of HTI can also be applied to manage non-communicable diseases in rural populations as well.
Principal Investigator : Jerry Hella
Department Name : BRCT
Time frame: (2020-01-01) - (2021-10-31)
Charite Universitatsmedizin Berlin (Normal)
External Collaborating Partners
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