Using Biometrics to Turn the Tap Off of Multi Drug Resistant TB (MDR TB)

Operation ASHA (www.opasha.org) developed “eCompliance” several years ago as a tool for tracking patient adherence to tuberculosis treatment. eCompliance is a portable biometric identification system capable of identifying each patient by their unique fingerprint and compiling patient adherence data. eCompliance is also linked to an Electronic Medical System (EMR) at the back-end, which allows automatic generation of all reports, improved transparency and reliability, increased productivity and elimination of human error. The latest system consists of an Android tablet connected to a commodity fingerprint reader with a USB cable. Only standardized off-the-shelf components, which are used for myriad other purposes, are employed. Each component is freely available across the world. This distinguishes eCompliance from other biometric systems that remain highly specialized & expensive, and cannot be used in resource-limited settings, especially by small organizations. The very latest innovation is the text free application that can be used across the world in zero-literacy areas, where names have been replaced by icons, and written instructions replaced by graphics. eCompliance has achieved tremendous success, having raised Treatment Success Rate to 86.9%, 2.7 TIMES HIGHER than 32% one found by a WHO consultant in 2011 in Chhattisgarh state of India. There is no doubt that eCompliance is a BREAKTHROUGH technology. It has been scaled to India, Uganda, Cambodia and the Dominican Republic and can easily be replicated in other countries. It has already enrolled nearly 9000 TB patients and clocked over half a million transactions on over 170 machines.