Digital Adherence Technologies (DATs) are an increasingly popular method for verifying patient adherence to many medications. We analyze data from one city served by 99DOTS, a phone-call-based DAT deployed for Tuberculosis (TB) treatment in India where nearly 3 million people are afflicted with the disease each year. The data contains nearly 17,000 patients and 2.1M dose records. We lay the groundwork for learning from this real-world data, including a method for avoiding the effects of unobserved interventions in training data used for machine learning. We then construct a deep learning model, demonstrate its interpretability, and show how it can be adapted and trained in different clinical scenarios to better target and improve patient care. In the real-time risk prediction setting our model could be used to proactively intervene with 21% more patients and before 76% more missed doses than current heuristic baselines. For outcome prediction, our model performs 40% better than baseline methods, allowing cities to target more resources to clinics with a heavier burden of patients at risk of failure. Finally, we present a case study demonstrating how our model can be trained in an end-to-end decision focused learning setting to achieve 15% better solution quality in an example decision problem faced by health workers.
which often leads to further widening of the treatment gap for CMDs during and after such conditions. 7,8 To reduce the treatment gap for CMDs, the government of India has taken initiatives such as an increase in the number of training institutes for psychiatry and allied courses and also postgraduate seats. 5,9 Besides, the stepped care models may be used to improve the delivery of mental health services in the rural and inaccessible regions, with a primary focus on cost-effectiveness, accessibility, and sustainability. 10 Globally, COVID-19 affected almost every aspect of health care because of the implementation of public health measures to control the spread of infection, the COVID-19-specific mortalities and
Ensuring that patients adhere to prescribed medication remains an important challenge in global health. While technology has been utilized to monitor and improve adherence, solutions to date have been too costly for large-scale deployment in developing regions. This paper describes 99DOTS, a low-cost approach for tracking adherence using a combination of paper packaging and low-end mobile phones. Every day, patients reveal an unpredictable phone number behind the pills and send a free call to that number to indicate that drugs were dispensed and taken. Within five years of its inception, 99DOTS has become a standard of care for tuberculosis in India and has enrolled over 200,000 patients. We provide a holistic account of the project's evolution, including its iterative design, scaled implementation, and lessons learned along the way. We hope this account will serve as a useful case study for anyone seeking to establish and scale new low-cost technologies for a global audience.
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