For nearly a decade, iSanté has allowed providers to share information among care team members and health professionals.
Over the past several years, the U.S. President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR) has invested heavily in health systems and clinical data analyses in low-income countries around the world, in its efforts to support the care and treatment of those affected by HIV and AIDS.
With the support of PEPFAR, through the Health Resources and Services Administration (HRSA), in 2005, the International Training and Education Center for Health (I-TECH), together with Haiti’s Ministère de la Santé Publique et de la Population (MSPP) and the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), developed and implemented iSanté — an electronic medical record system to capture and report information on patients living with HIV and AIDS.
For nearly a decade, this system has allowed providers to document HIV patient care, look up patient care histories, and share information between care team members and health professionals.
The MSPP has been particularly concerned with patient adherence to antiretroviral therapy (ART) and treatment failure due to a number of factors, including the 2010 Haiti earthquake. While iSanté has gotten kudos in Haiti for storing and linking patient data, three recent papers, lead-authored by I-TECH Research and Evaluation Advisor Nancy Puttkammer, have illustrated the potential of using this data source to identify and help solve the challenges of adherence and patient attrition.
- “Before and After the Earthquake: A Case Study of Attrition from the HIV Antiretroviral Therapy Program in Haiti,” published in Global Health Action in August 2014, compared attrition from the national HIV ART program at two large public-sector hospitals where I-TECH works. One site was less than 30 km from the epicenter of the devastating earthquake of January 2010, while the other site was outside of the area strongly affected by the earthquake. Surprisingly, the paper showed that attrition improved after the earthquake in the site closest to the epicenter. This finding underscores the resilience of patients and providers, and contributes evidence that it is possible to maintain continuity of HIV services even in the context of a complex humanitarian emergency.
- “Development of an Electronic Medical Record Based Alert for Risk of HIV Treatment Failure in a Low-Resource Setting,” published in PLOSOne in November 2014, shows that ART-dispensing data and other data contained in iSanté can be used to estimate patients’ adherence to their medications and predict the patients most likely to experience ART treatment failure in the future. Having an alert to signal patients with high risk of future treatment failure could help providers better target counseling and other adherence support.
- “Patient Attrition from the HIV Antiretroviral Therapy Program at Two Hospitals in Haiti,” currently in press at the Pan American Journal of Public Health, examines ART attrition at the same two hospitals, during the period 2005-2011. The study found higher risk of attrition among patients who lived farther away from the hospital, who started on non-standard ART regimens, who did not receive ART adherence counseling before initiating ART, and who rapidly started ART following their enrollment in HIV care and treatment. The findings suggest opportunities for several quality improvement interventions at the two hospitals.
“This research has provided a valuable contribution in documenting health outcomes and encouraging improvement in the ART program in Haiti,” says Dr. Scott Barnhart, Professor of General Internal Medicine and Global Health at the University of Washington. “We are at the dawn of translating large investments in EMRs into useful data for improving the care of patients, as well as supporting important pub