On the use of telephone for tracing absentee/defaulter in leprosy

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