Typically, an active TB patient is required to take six months of medication to cure the disease. However, irregular adherence or non-adherence to pills is a common occurrence. This increases the increase the risk of death, chances of relapse, and drug resistance among the patients. The Central TB Division (CTD) launched an Integrated Digital Adherence Technology Initiative (IDAT) in 2019 to deliver more patient-centric monitoring and management at scale. But an interim assessment indicated that while IDAT had achieved significant coverage of digital adherence technologies (DATs) over a brief period, several barriers at the level of the health system, health workers and patients needed to be overcome to achieve their desired impact on patient outcomes. Furthermore, currently, the adoption and expansion of DATs is the largest in the public sector. But it is predicted that the impact would be greater if these tools are extended to privately treated TB patients.
MIHM has received a grant from BMGF to conduct a multi-year, multi-faceted, comprehensive study to evaluate three adherence monitoring methods from both patient and healthcare worker’s perspectives against the standard of care in the private sector.
The four key objectives are to:
(a) Quantify the impact of these monitoring methods on patients’ medication adherence and clinical outcomes
(b) Identify the underlying mechanisms and pathways (“the how”) of the impact of these monitoring methods
(c) Optimise the effect of these monitoring methods on the workflow processes of frontline workers
(d) Estimate the programmatic costs of their implementation and scale-up.