Published In

BMC Medicine

Document Type

Article

Publication Date

7-2015

Subjects

AIDS (Disease) -- Treatment -- Uganda, AIDS (Disease) -- Uganda -- Clinical trials, Antiretroviral therapy, AIDS (Disease) -- Patients -- Counseling of

Physical Description

11 pages

Abstract

Background: Up to 50 % of HIV-infected persons in sub-Saharan Africa are lost from care between HIV diagnosis and antiretroviral therapy (ART) initiation. Structural barriers, including cost of transportation to clinic and poor communication systems, are major contributors.

Methods: We conducted a prospective, pragmatic, before-and-after clinical trial to evaluate a combination mobile health and transportation reimbursement intervention to improve care at a publicly operated HIV clinic in Uganda. Patients undergoing CD4 count testing were enrolled, and clinicians selected a result threshold that would prompt early return for ART initiation or further care. Participants enrolled in the pre-intervention period (January – August 2012) served as a control group. Participants in the intervention period (September 2012 – November 2013) were randomized to receive daily short message service (SMS) messages for up to seven days in one of three formats: 1) messages reporting an abnormal result directly, 2) personal identification number-protected messages reporting an abnormal result, or 3) messages reading “ABCDEFG” to confidentially convey an abnormal result. Participants returning within seven days of their first message received transportation reimbursements (about $6USD). Our primary outcomes of interest were time to return to clinic and time to ART initiation.

Results: There were 45 participants in the pre-intervention period and 138 participants in the intervention period (46, 49, and 43 in the direct, PIN, and coded groups, respectively) with low CD4 count results. Median time to clinic return was 33 days (IQR 11–49) in the pre-intervention period and 6 days (IQR 3–16) in the intervention period (P < 0.001); and median time to ART initiation was 47 days (IQR 11–75) versus 12 days (IQR 5–19), (P < 0.001). In multivariable models, participants in the intervention period had earlier return to clinic (AHR 2.32, 95 %CI 1.53 to 3.51) and earlier time to ART initiation (AHR 2.27, 95 %CI 1.38 to 3.72). All three randomized message formats improved time to return to clinic and time to ART initiation (P < 0.01 for all comparisons versus the pre-intervention period).

Conclusions: A combination of an SMS laboratory result communication system and transportation reimbursements significantly decreased time to clinic return and time to ART initiation after abnormal CD4 test results.

Trial registrations: Clinicaltrials.gov NCT01579214, approved 13 April 2012.

Description

David R. Bangsberg was affiliated with the Division of Infectious Diseases, Department of Medicine, Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School at time of writing.

This manuscript was presented as a late-breaker abstract at the Conference on Retroviruses and Opportunistic Infections, Boston, MA, March 2014.

© Siedner et al. 2015

This article is published under license to BioMed Central Ltd. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly credited. The Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication waiver (http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/) applies to the data made available in this article, unless otherwise stated.

DOI

10.1186/s12916-015-0397-1

Persistent Identifier

http://archives.pdx.edu/ds/psu/18444

Publisher

BioMed Central

Additional Files
a bs12916-015-0397-1-s1.pdf (15 kB)
Characteristics of study participants
a b 2s12916-015-0397-1-s2.pdf (14 kB)
Characteristics and time to clinic return for study participant
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