India bears more than 27 percent of the global burden of TB, with 2.7 million cases and 449,000 deaths annually. The TB treatment regimen prescribed by the World Health Organization is painful and lengthy, and getting patients to adhere to this 6 to 8-month long treatment regimen is a challenge. Early diagnosis and completion of the full treatment regimen is the cornerstone of an effective TB prevention and control strategy.

Qualcomm Wireless Reach and Operation ASHA (OpASHA) has announced the results of their collaboration on the development of a mobile-enabled e-Counselling application to help Community Health Workers (CHWs) in India improve tuberculosis (TB) treatment outcomes.

The e-Counselling app is provided to CHWs on a Qualcomm SnapdragonTM powered tablet. CHWs use this technology to educate themselves about TB and provide more effective counseling to patients.

The e-counseling mobile app features high-value informational videos about TB. Each video addresses a different topic, such as critical aspects of the disease and treatment, treatment myths, and strategies for getting patients to adhere to their full course of treatment.  

The e-counseling app has enhanced the effectiveness of CHWs in the TB counseling process because it has increased awareness and understanding of TB and its treatment regimen among patients and their families leading to adherence of the patients to the TB treatment regimen. Further, the e-counseling app helps in removing the stigma and myths associated with the disease.  

Until now, more than 10,000 patients in six states of India have been counseled using the videos.

Based on this program’s success, OpASHA has expanded the use of its e-Counselling videos to Cambodia, Zambia, and Afghanistan.  

Qualcomm Wireless Reach and Operation ASHA have also collaborated on developing video conferencing solutions for training CHWs in their city instead of bringing them to Delhi for classroom training. 99 CHWs based in 11 districts of India have collectively received more than 900 days of training via video conferencing on 4G LTE networks. The remote training has reduced OpASHA’s training costs by more than 60 percent.