[telemedicine] South African Town Uses Text Messaging to Help Manage AIDS

[Medical Informatics News]

How do you make the expertise of two doctors and two nurses spread far and wide enough to
take care of more than 500 HIV/AIDS patients? In this gritty township, the answer is text messaging. From Wired
News:



When therapeutic counselor Flora Thobela visited one of her regular HIV/AIDS patients at home recently, the woman
said she was vomiting and felt nauseous.

Alarm bells went off in Thobela’s head. To her, it sounded like a case of lactic acidosis, a dangerous side effect
of the anti-retroviral, or ARV, drugs her patient was taking. So she pulled out her cell phone and sent a “red alert”
by SMS to the clinic’s central computer system.

”I was panicking inside because I knew that if it was the side effect that I thought it was, she could die,”
recalls Thobela, who works for the Sizophila Project, an AIDS treatment program located in this township near Cape
Town.

Fortunately, the woman got treatment in time. Using an experimental cell phone-based software program called
Cell-Life, Thobela alerted the clinic staff to the problem, and arranged for
the woman to see the clinic doctor the next day — all in a flurry of text messagi

http://telemedicine.weblogsinc.com/e...4827625082351/