output-based healthcare

The Uganda program continues to grow and learn.  Berkeley graduate students Melissa Ho and Matthew Hamilton presented at the recent annual meeting of the American Public Health Association (APHA) in San Diego.  Melissa is developing an early version of a mobile medical claims management system for the Uganda OBA program.  Information management is critical for proper patient treatment and valid reimbursement and her system is a big step in the right direction. Her APHA slides are available here.  Matt presented on preliminary findings from the “before-after” population evaluation (hamilton-apha-slides).  We looked at two specific outcomes: knowledge of STI symptoms and syphilis prevalence.  The analysis is crude (my insistence on sharing what we know now) and further work is underway to make the comparison truly comparable between baseline and follow-up surveys.  Knowledge of 7 of 9 STI symptoms appeared to improve between baseline and follow-up.  More promising, syphilis prevalence (TPHA and VDRL results) showed a decline between 2006 and 2007.  A mile-high caveat on these findings - we have yet to control for secular trends and compositional effects in these data.  More coming soon …