Leprosy
Mailing List, May 18th, 2009
Ref.:
On the use of telephone for tracing absentee/defaulter in
leprosy
From:
Kruijff A. (de), Pemba, Cabo Delgado, Mozambique
Dear
Dr. Edward,
Thank
you for your message dated LML April 25th, 2009.
Here in
Mozambique
we have been working on a possibly related issue that may or may not
be of interest to you.
In the north of
Mozambique
we have fair cellphone coverage and nearly all healthcare workers have
a cellphone. We have set up a automatic cellphone patient
notification system whereby new diagnosed cases and completion of
treatment notifications can be done via normal SMS message.
A server receives these messages, does a basic integrity test, and if
it passes puts the patient in the provincial/national leprosy
register. It then sends a
message to the sender to confirm reception and to pass on the unique
patient number. It can also be used to automatically send
reminders from time to time to nurses/supervisors following up
patients, and if patients have cellphones you could work it that they
are reminded as well.
It uses simple hardware for instance an old laptop and oldish
cellphone connected to the laptop. Software is free - Ubuntu,
MySql and Gammu. The
project here is still in development and is unfortunately standing
still at present due to time constraints. We have not done any
studies to evaluate effectiveness.
Kind regards,
Arie de Kruijff
TLM-Mozambique
