
Patient compliance is essential for TB treatment success, but it is challenging to sustain for the whole six month duration of the treatment. Current means of ensuring the adherence is Directly Observed Therapy (DOT), where patients need to report daily to a clinic and take their medication under direct observation of a healthcare worker. This may be inconvenient and costly to patients and also strain the resources of national TB control programmes.
As an alternative patient-centered approach, SPRINT-TB Theme 4 has developed MIST (Mobile Interactive Supervised Therapy), a platform for smartphone-based treatment supervision to enhance TB treatment regimen adherence. It enables patients to submit videos of themselves taking pills, thereby removing the need for them to attend the DOT clinic in person.
MIST has been tested with healthy volunteers and found to be acceptable and effective in supporting adherence to pill taking (published in BMJ Open in December 2016). The study will further expand to the countries in the region to test the approach in TB patients.
As an alternative patient-centered approach, SPRINT-TB Theme 4 has developed MIST (Mobile Interactive Supervised Therapy), a platform for smartphone-based treatment supervision to enhance TB treatment regimen adherence. It enables patients to submit videos of themselves taking pills, thereby removing the need for them to attend the DOT clinic in person.
MIST has been tested with healthy volunteers and found to be acceptable and effective in supporting adherence to pill taking (published in BMJ Open in December 2016). The study will further expand to the countries in the region to test the approach in TB patients.